The left’s war against inanimate objects continues unabated. Except this time it appears as though they’ve enlisted a major sports league in the cause.
Here is a PSA put forward by Everytown USA, which features the Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony, the Warriors’ Steph Curry, the Bulls’ Joakim Noah, and the Clippers’ Chris Paul. The spot will air during NBA Christmas Day games this Friday:
This ad, harmless though it may seem to most, is anything but. Everytown USA is backed by anti-2nd Amendment billionaire Michael Bloomberg. And Spike Lee, the same Spike Lee who once voiced his wish for Charlton Heston to be shot with a .44 caliber bulldog, helped broker the deal between the NBA and Everytown and sits on the creative council of Everytown USA.
So the notion that this is some benign partnership between the NBA and a group of “concerned citizens” with no broader agenda other than making Americans safe can be easily dismissed.
But sit back and bear with me here, because there are layers to this onion.
First of all, why does there need to be an anti-mass shooting PSA in the first place? Are people not aware that mass shootings are happening? Is there a large population of Americans that are pro-mass shooting? I’m pretty sure the only group of Americans that are pro-mass shooting are the shooters themselves, and I’m guessing that Bloomberg’s jock-friendly PSA is not going to succeed where years of psychiatric therapy and prescribed drugs have failed.
The other thing, and this argument is already being made in social media by some, is that the ad does not mention gun control and does not explicitly advocate for taking away guns as a means of preventing “gun violence.”
Here’s the thing though; nowhere in the ad does it mention anything except guns and “gun violence.” If you were to have landed here from another planet and watched that ad, you would be left with nothing else to conclude other than that this world had a terrible problem with guns jumping off of shelves, loading themselves, gaining access to schools, and shooting everyone in sight.
Had the ad been interested in actually finding a constitutional solution to the problem of mass shootings, Steph Curry might have said, “Let’s work together to find a way to fix our mental health system so as to identify and treat people who might lash out in violence before it’s too late.” Or, Joakim Noah would say, “Let’s reform privacy laws so as to allow people doing background checks to be able to see the full mental health and psychiatric history of people who are purchasing guns so we don’t put deadly weapons in the hands of those who might use them for evil.”
Any one of those arguments, alone or in combination with others would have been helpful. But what the NBA did here is not. Instead, the league continued in its well-worn path of leftist radicalization and partnered with a known radical ideologue to put out a PSA that doesn’t even remotely address the problem.
And sadly, in all likelihood, the Association will not be the last to do it.
