The Red Sea

NBA coach Gregg Popovich, widely regarded as one of the best in the business, had a few things to say regarding gun violence after his last game this season.

Take it away, Gregg.

“[Republican lawmakers] are going to cloak all this stuff (in) the myth of the Second Amendment. You know it's just a myth, a joke. It's just a game they play. I mean, that's freedom? Is it freedom for kids to go to school and try to socialize and try to learn and be scared to death they might die that day?

“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. 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. That was our anxiety.” 

“What would it take? I mean, we've got two young black guys in Tennessee who just got railroaded by a bunch of people that I would bet down deep in their soul want to go back to Jim Crow. And what they just did is a good start. It's beyond comprehension. And what were they guilty of? They actually protested?”

“That's hard to believe in America [that they were called insurrectionists by some Tennessee legislators] but America ain't what we thought America was. It's changed. So, if those kids are insurrectionists, what were the people on January 6th? What do we call them? What's the next step or word or level of violence after insurrectionists?"

“[Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn] after the massacre said, ‘My office is in contact with federal, state and local officials and we stand ready to assist.’ In what? They're dead. What are you going to assist with? Cleaning up their brains off the wall? Wiping the blood off the school room floor? What are you going to assist with?”

“You know, the greed of the gun lobbies and the manufacturers is obvious. We all know that. Money talks, but the cowardice and the selfishness of the legislators who are so scared to death of being primaried and losing their job, losing their power, losing their salary — you'd like to get each one of them in a room just one by one and say, ‘What's more important to you? If you could vote for some good gun safety laws that most of the public agrees to, would you do that if it saved one kid? Or is your job and your money so important to you that you would say, ‘Screw the kid?’ ”

“Do we have to show that classroom? That's a pretty big step, right? That's just gross to think about. But do we need to show it, like the girl running with napalm on her back (during the Vietnam War)? So, they actually see that these parents couldn't even tell if it was their kid, that they had to go the DNA route?” 

“We have a governor [Gregg Abbott] and a lieutenant governor [Dan Patrick] and an attorney general [Ken Paxton] that made it easier to have more guns, and that was in response to our kids getting murdered. I just thought that was a little bit of a strange decision. Just me, though.”

=Lefty=