One week has passed since Gregg Popovich popped, and ... if you can look beyond his I-Hate-Republicans bias, where is he wrong?
“When I pick up my 6- and 11-year-old grandkids at school, when I’m here at home, on the way it goes through my mind, that, ‘I hope they’re going to be OK,’” the San Antonio Spurs coach said on April 9 before his team played the Mavericks.
That should not be a hope.
“And most of you in this room, when we were in school, we worried if Nancy would dance with us on Friday after the football game, or something,” he said. “That was our anxiety.”
Most parents and grandparents can relate to this new-age anxiety.
The aforementioned quote is part of Pop’s nine-minute rant about the state of gun control in the United States (ironic we call it gun control when it is anything but).
By now most people have heard, or read, Pop’s rant in which he calls out mostly Republican legislators for the continued state of gun violence in the United States.
Waiting seven days to acknowledge “news” is journalistically archaic, but it was a safe bet Pop’s comments were going to be relevant for ... the way we’re going, for forever. The day after Pop’s rant, there was another mass shooting, this time in Louisville where a person murdered five people at a bank.
There was another late Saturday night in Dadeville, Ala. A town of just 3,000, this is the second mass shooting there since 2016. Louisville had one more on Saturday night, too.
However you classify yourself — Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, moderate, frustrated, ambivalent, checked out — this is a problem. This is an American problem.
It will not change until we collectively agree that it’s a problem.
This is not an anti-gun rant or another attack on America’s Second Amendment laws.
This is about taking the time to acknowledge that gun violence is a U.S. issue; the common thread isn’t mental illness, video games, Netflix, Apple TV, Disney +, or anything of that sort.
The common thread in mass shootings are Americans, guns and dead Americans. Dead Black Americans. Dead white Americans. Dead women. Dead men.
Dead little girls and boys.
The promise of safety at every turn is preposterous, but what we have allowed, and now accept, is pathetic. It’s un-American, because a good guy with a gun isn’t thinking like the bad guy with a gun.
There is a flaw in that logic.
And, globally, we are a joke because of it.
On Sunday night, a few hours after Pop went off, “60 Minutes” aired its segment on Saudia Arabia and “sportswashing.” The Saudis spend billions on sports in an attempt to improve its international perception shaped by images of government oppression through violence, state-approved torture and murder.
“60 Minutes” correspondent Jon Wertheim asked Saudi Arabia’s sports minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Faisal, about this.
“We had the mass shooting a couple of weeks ago in the U.S.; does that mean we don’t host the World Cup in the U.S.? No,” Al Faisal said. “We should go to the U.S. We should get people together.”
Wertheim was quick to point out these mass shootings are not state sponsored.
“Whatever,” Al Faisal said. “People died.”
Al Faisal is not right, but that he is able to point to America’s earned reputation of mass shootings is sad, and an indictment on us as citizens, and our elected officials, whose priority is to remain in office above all else.
Listen to the words on this topic from a noted liberal, and someone whose political career was built on the idea of less government, the 44th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan.
In 1983 at a Republican Party fundraiser in California, Reagan said, “Those who seek to inflict harm are not phased by gun control laws. I happened to know this from personal experience.”
He’s right. Reagan survived an assassination attempt in March of 1981. He was shot by John Hinkley, who used a pistol.
Also, just because Reagan is right it doesn’t mean we give up, which we have.
In 1989, at a forum at USC, Reagan said: “I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen to own guns for sporting, for hunting, and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon, or needed for the defense of the home.”
Obtaining an automatic weapon is a laborious, challenging year-long process. Obtaining a semiautomatic weapon, however, is not that hard.
As we have seen over the last several years, one doesn’t need an AK-47 to murder a lot of innocent people. One just needs a semiautomatic weapon to do serious damage and ruin lives.
As we have seen over the last 20 years, we have done 0.3% to stop any of it, which is why so many parents and grandparents have anxiety when they drop their kid off at school.
That’s a not Democrat problem. That’s not a Republican problem.
That’s an “our” problem.
The sooner we own it, and the common thread, maybe we will do something about it. Maybe.
Until then, expect more dead Americans.
Expect more dead kids.
