Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr excoriated Senate Republicans Tuesday, following the deadly mass shooting at an elementary school in Texas.
At a special press conference, Kerr blasted Republican senators for blocking House Resolution 8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021, a bill which would require private individuals transferring gun ownership to conduct a background check, with a licensed gun dealer taking possession of the firearm during the check.
"In the last 10 days, we've had elderly black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we've had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California, and now we have children murdered at school. When are we going to do something?"
“There’s 50 senators, right now, who refuse to vote on HR8, which is a background check rule that the House passed a few years ago.”
“Are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children and our elderly and our churchgoers? Because that is what it looks like.”
The bill has strong support among congressional Democrats, and was passed by the House on a largely party-line vote in 2021. Republican lawmakers have opposed the bill, claiming it would do nothing to prevent criminals from carrying out unsupervised firearm transfers.
Kerr, a prominent critic of Donald Trump and a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, is a long-time advocate of expanded gun control legislation.
Born to American parents working in Lebanon, Kerr’s father was shot and killed in 1984 by a Hezbollah-aligned terror group called Islamic Jihad (though not related to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement).