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- Cogito ergo sum
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N.B.A. Lends Its Name and Its Stars to Campaign Against Gun Violence
N.B.A. Lends Its Name and Its Stars to Campaign Against Gun Violence
By ZACH SCHONBRUN and MICHAEL BARBARO
DEC. 23, 2015
The National Basketball Association, alarmed by the death toll from shootings across the country, is stepping directly into the polarizing debate over guns, regulation and the Second Amendment with an unusual advertising campaign in partnership with one of the nation’s most aggressive advocates of stricter limits on firearm sales.
In a move with little precedent in professional sports, the N.B.A. is putting the weight of its multibillion-dollar brand and the prestige of its star athletes behind a series of television commercials calling for an end to gun violence.
The first ads, timed to reach millions of basketball fans during a series of marquee games on Christmas Day, focus on shooting victims and contain no policy recommendations. The words “gun control” are never mentioned.
But the organization that paid for them, Everytown for Gun Safety, has a robust and controversial agenda: It was founded by former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg specifically as a counterweight to the National Rifle Association, and the group also battles at the local, state and federal level to expand background checks for gun buyers, strengthen penalties for gun trafficking and ban gun sales to people convicted of domestic abuse.
Besides N.B.A. players, the ads feature survivors of shootings and relatives of those killed by guns.
The N.B.A.’s involvement suggests that a bloody year of gun deaths — in highly publicized mass shootings and countless smaller-scale incidents — may be spurring even some generally risk-averse, mainstream institutions to action.
Players who appear in the first 30-second ad, which will run five times on Friday, speak in personal terms about the effects of gun violence on their lives. Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors describes hearing of a 3-year-old’s shooting: “My daughter Riley’s that age,” he says. Chris Paul of the Los Angeles Clippers recalls the advice he heeded as a child: “My parents used to say, ‘A bullet doesn’t have a name on it.’”
The N.B.A. said it held little internal debate about working with Mr. Bloomberg’s group. “We know far too many people who have been caught up in gun violence in this country,” said Kathleen Behrens, the league’s president of social responsibility and player programs. “And we can do something about it.”
But the decision may prove tricky for the league: While many of its teams are based in cities dominated by Democrats, a number of other teams — and millions of N.B.A. fans — hail from places where Mr. Bloomberg and his approach to guns are viewed with deep suspicion. Ms. Behrens said the league had not shown the ads to team owners, but added, “We’re not worried about any political implications.”
The Bloomberg-N.B.A. partnership was brokered by an unlikely figure: Spike Lee, a member of Everytown’s creative council, whose latest film, “Chi-Raq,” set on Chicago’s South Side, confronts gun violence with an unflinching eye.
Over breakfast at the Loews Regency Hotel in Manhattan in November, not long before the movie was released earlier this month, Mr. Lee proposed the idea for the ads to John Skipper, the president of ESPN, who then took it to Adam Silver, the N.B.A.’s commissioner. Mr. Lee insisted on the participation of Everytown, with which he collaborated on a protest march down Broadway after the film’s New York premiere.
In an interview, he sounded many of the themes that Mr. Bloomberg himself has emphasized in the past, saying it was time for “common sense anti-gun laws.”
“But because of the N.R.A., politicians and the gun manufacturers, we’re dying under that tyranny,” Mr. Lee said. Reciting a statistic from Everytown, he added: “Ninety Americans are dying every day because of the N.R.A., gun manufacturers, and politicians willing to run you under the table.”
Mr. Bloomberg’s interventionist policies as mayor and his left-leaning tactics on guns have earned the vitriol of gun-rights advocates, who mocked him with TV ads as an out-of-touch elitist last year and attacked him again during a Republican presidential debate in August.
“Bloomberg tries to ban your snack food, your sodas and, most of all, your guns,” declared one ad paid for by the N.R.A. “Hey, Bloomberg: Keep your politics in New York. And keep your hands off our guns and our freedom.”
But the commercials to be broadcast on Christmas represent the evolution of Mr. Bloomberg’s strategy for changing the nation’s gun culture and the rules that govern it.
After blasting the N.R.A. for years, and seeking to use his personal fortune to punish lawmakers who ran afoul of his legislative goals (“We’ve got to make them afraid of us,” he once said), Mr. Bloomberg is emphasizing the experiences of gun victims, building grass-roots networks in states, developing partnerships with well-known figures and crafting a message that focuses on the noncontroversial goal of ending gun violence, rather than the divisive aim of “gun control.”
John Feinblatt, a former top mayoral aide to Mr. Bloomberg who is president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said the group appreciated that Americans would first need to understand the depth and breadth of the damage caused by gun violence before they would coalesce around any set of solutions. (The ad is being produced not by Everytown’s political lobby but by an affiliated educational nonprofit.)
“This,” Mr. Feinblatt said of the N.B.A. ads, “is clearly about educating the public.”
Besides N.B.A. players, the ads feature survivors of shootings and relatives of those killed by guns, including Andy Parker, whose daughter, Alison, a television reporter in Virginia, was shot to death in the middle of a live broadcast by a former co-worker. Everytown for Gun Safety paid for the production of the commercials, and the league donated time that it controls during games on ABC and ESPN, which will broadcast the ads.
Pro athletes and teams have spoken out in different ways on gun violence before. Mets players and front-office staff posed for a photograph in June wearing orange T-shirts, the color of gun safety, in a display organized by Everytown. In 2013, a group of former N.F.L. players advocated tougher gun laws in an ad organized by a different group financed by Mr. Bloomberg.
But until now, no major sports league has lent its name and logo to such an effort.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.