N.B.A. Lends Its Name and Its Stars to Campaign Against Gun Violence

[DaNGeROuS KiLLeR]

 

 

The National Basketball Association, alarmed by the death toll from shootings across the country, is stepping into the polarizing debate over guns, their regulation and the Second Amendment with an 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 the ads, Everytown for Gun Safety, has a robust and controversial agenda: It was founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, a former New York mayor, specifically as a counterweight to the National Rifle Association and 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.

 

 

 

 

The N.B.A.’s involvement suggests that a bloody year of gun deaths — in highly publicized mass shootings and countless smaller-scale episodes — 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 had little internal debate about working with Mr. Bloomberg’s group, although it emphasized that its partnership was with Everytown’s educational arm and not its political lobby.

 

 

 

 

“The public service announcement airing during our Christmas Day games highlights victims’ and a few of our players’ experiences with gun violence and is solely intended to raise awareness about the issue of personal safety in our communities,” said Mike Bass, the N.B.A.’s chief spokesman.

 

The ads, he added, do not “advocate for any change in law or policy.” The focus, he said, is on “trying to make our communities stronger and safer for kids and families.”

 

Still, despite the N.B.A.’s insistence that it is staying clear of politics in its ad campaign, the decision to join forces with Bloomberg’s group is notable and could prove tricky for the league. While many of its teams are based in cities dominated by Democrats sympathetic to Mr. Bloomberg’s approach on guns, a number of other clubs are in places where that stance is viewed with deep suspicion.

 

Kathleen Behrens, the league’s president for social responsibility and player programs, said the league had not shown the ads to team owners but added, “We’re not worried about any political implications.”

 

The ads did draw the attention of President Obama, a consistent gun-control advocate, who took to Twitter to praise the league.

 

“I’m proud of the NBA for taking a stand against gun violence,” he wrote. “Sympathy for victims isn’t enough — change requires all of us speaking up.”

 

The partnership between Mr. Bloomberg and the N.B.A. 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 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 his film’s New York premiere.

 

In an interview, Mr. Lee sounded many of the themes that Mr. Bloomberg 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.

 

Mr. Bloomberg’s interventionist policies as mayor and his bold tactics on guns have earned the vitriol of gun-rights advocates, who have mocked him with TV ads as an out-of-touch elitist.

 

“Bloomberg tries to ban your snack food, your sodas and, most of all, your guns,” one ad paid for by the N.R.A. declared. “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 Friday represent the evolution of Mr. Bloomberg’s strategy for changing the nation’s gun culture and the rules that govern it.

 

Having blasted the N.R.A. for years and used his personal fortune to try 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 victims of gun violence, 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 the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said Americans needed to understand the extent of the damage caused by gun violence before they would coalesce around any set of solutions.

 

“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. 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. Until now, however, no major sports league has lent its name and logo to such an effort.

 

“We know far too many people who have been caught up in gun violence in this country,” Ms. Behrens said. “And we can do something about it.”

 

For the N.B.A., whose public-service partnerships have tended to involve groups like Habitat for Humanity and the Boys & Girls Clubs, the foray into the issue of gun violence is a significant departure. But it reflects a political awakening inside the league that is led not by its executives but by its players.

 

In 2012, members of the Miami Heat, including LeBron James, wore hooded sweatshirts in solidarity with Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager shot to death in Florida. In 2014, Mr. James, as a member of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and other N.B.A. players wore warm-up shirts that read, “I can’t breathe” — the words that Eric Garner, a black man from Staten Island who was put in a chokehold by a police officer, uttered just before he died.

 

 

Harry Edwards, the sociologist who, as leader of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, helped organize the raised-fist protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the 1968 Summer Games, said too much gun violence was “tied into this masculine mystique — having to do with being respected as a man, or tough as a man.”

 

“When Steph Curry or Carmelo Anthony are saying, ‘No, there’s nothing masculine about that; the violence has to stop,’ these are the people that young African-American males around the country are identifying with,” Mr. Edwards said. “It has more impact than if the president had said it.”