'Pathetic!': NBA coach criticizes Sen. McConnell after Texas massacre 2:51
(CNN) --
Sometimes it takes someone who isn't in politics to point out the madness that dominates our current political moment.
On Tuesday night, following a shooting at a Texas school that left 19 children and two adults dead, that person was Steve Kerr, the head coach of the NBA's Golden State Warriors.
He was openly emotional, angry and frustrated.
You should see his full statement, but here's the key part:
"When are we going to do something? I'm tired. I'm so tired of coming up here and offering condolences to devastated families. I'm tired of moments of silence. Enough... So I ask you, Mitch McConnell and all of you Senators who refuse to do anything about the violence, the school shootings, and the supermarket shootings. I ask you, will you put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children, our elders, and our parishioners? "Because that's what it looks like. That's what we do every week. I'm sick of it. I've had enough. We can't become numb to this. We can't sit here and just read about this and say, let's have a moment of silence."
(For those who want to dismiss Steve Kerr as just a basketball coach, it's worth remembering that his father was shot to death in 1984 at the American University of Beirut.)
Suspect in Uvalde attack sent chilling messages to teen he met online
Steve Kerr specifically referred to HR 8, a House bill that would expand background checks to include private gun sales and sales at gun shows.
The measure first passed the House in 2019: eight Republicans joined 232 Democrats in voting for it, but it found no way through the Senate.
It was reintroduced in the House (and passed again with bipartisan support) in 2021.
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Last December, Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy attempted to pass HR 8 by unanimous consent, but was blocked by Senate Republicans.
In a Senate speech Tuesday after the Uvalde shooting, Murphy criticized his colleagues for his lack of action.
"Guns flow in this country like water, and that's why we have mass shooting after mass shooting and, you know, spare me the *** about mental illness," Murphy said.
"We don't have more mental illness than any other country in the world. You can't explain this through a mental illness prism because... we're not outliers in mental illness, we're outliers when it comes to access to guns and the ability of criminals and very sick people to get hold of firearms. That's what makes America different."
At issue is the 60-vote threshold needed to end debate in the Senate.
Without 60 votes on any gun control legislation, there is no way forward.
And at the moment, unless something major changes, there is no 60 vote in the Senate for anything that is perceived as restricting gun rights.
The closest the Senate came to addressing the nation's gun violence epidemic was in 2013, when a bipartisan effort spearheaded by West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey that would have expanded background checks received 54 votes.
(Murphy, for what it's worth, dismissed using the Manchin-Toomey proposal as a blueprint for future action. "Manchin-Toomey is not just a background check bill," he said Wednesday. "It has a lot of sweeteners designed to get the support of the NRA").
What's remarkable about the Senate gun impasse is that, as Kerr pointed out, a large majority of the public, regardless of political party, supports some new gun restrictions.
A 2021 Pew Research Center poll showed that 87% of Americans supported preventing people with mental illness from buying guns, while 81% supported making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to bans. background checks.
Two-thirds of Americans supported a national weapons database and banned high-capacity ammunition magazines.
And yet, and yet, and yet.
During a speech Wednesday, McConnell said he was praying for those involved in the shooting and blamed the shooter, calling him a "deranged young man" and a "maniac," CNN's Ted Barrett reported.
He did not mention the access he had to guns or any legislative solutions.
There are those who will argue that this proposal or that proposal would not have prevented what happened in Texas on Tuesday.
What, good.
But back to Steve Kerr.
This is not a dry legislative proposal.
It's about who we are and who we want to be as a country.
Do we want to keep rinsing and repeating with these mass shootings?
Do we want to become desensitized (or more desensitized) to what happened in Uvalde or Newtown or dozens of other places across the country?
Or do we want to do what we can to change things, with the recognition that no public policy proposal is perfect or will completely solve our problem of gun violence?
"I've had enough," Kerr said as he walked away from the microphone.
I also.
Texas