Game On, Washington! Examining American Sport’s Response to the Uvalde Massacre

Abstract

On May 24, 2022, a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. In the aftermath, stakeholders within and across sports came together to call for political action around gun control. These included individual athletes (e.g., Natasha Cloud of the Washington Mystics and DeMarcus Lawrence of the Dallas Cowboys), as well as coaches (e.g., Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs and Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors). In addition, the Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees coordinated their Twitter feeds to focus on gun violence statistics during a game, and the Miami Heat’s public address announcer, on behalf of the team, encouraged fans to call their state senators. In this essay, we examine the factors contributing to this coalescence. We build on relevant public administration scholarship that has examined the roles of athletes as social constructors and their impact on the administrative state. We contextualize this scholarship alongside the widespread public support for some measure of gun control. We also discuss future research avenues to examine the ongoing impacts of athlete protests.

Social Equity in Public Administration: Past, Present, and the Future

“…Although JPNA has always been dedicated to publishing articles that address any number of inequities in the public and nonprofit sectors, the Social Equity Section is a supplemental and dedicated outlet for this important work to disseminate topics commonly discounted in government and nonprofit affairs scholarship, as well as emerging social equity issues (Carroll, 2021). Since its inception, articles in the new Social Equity Section have included topics such as expanding sick leave during a global pandemic (Rauhaus & Johnson, 2021), reintegration programs and services for Black female parolees in Alabama (Moorer, 2021), increasing access to public administration research for individuals with disabilities (Allgood, 2021), appropriate terminology usage for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual plus (LGBTQIA+) communities (Meyer & Milleson, 2022), a historical analysis of American constitutional values and democratic beliefs toward social equity progression (Trochmann & Guy, 2022), a call for political action on gun control by the professional sports industry (Thomas & Levine Daniel, 2022), digital inequities in community revitalization (Marshall, 2023), and understanding the "B" in #Black Lives Matter (Houston & Krinch, 2023). They represent a broad array of emerging topics and much-needed discourse in social equity and public administration scholarship.…”