Gabe Kapler's Protest Against The National Anthem Aims at The Wrong Target

In response to last week's school shooting in Uvalde, Texas which claimed the lives of 19 children and two adults, San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler has seen fit to refuse to stand for the national anthem only to stand on Memorial Day so as not to be disrespectful to the soldiers who laid their lives for this country.

Frankly, I don't see how refusing to stand for The Star Spangled Banner is going to end gun violence anymore than kneeling during its playing is going to end police brutality. It is nothing more gesture politics which draws attention to oneself rather than the issue at hand. 

Mind you, I don't question Kapler's sincerity or eloquence:

We elect our politicians to represent our interests. Immediately following this shooting, we were told we needed locked doors and armed teachers. We were given thoughts and prayers. We were told it could have been worse, and we just need love.

But we weren’t given bravery, and we aren’t free. The police on the scene put a mother in handcuffs as she begged them to go in and save her children. They blocked parents trying to organize to charge in to stop the shooter, including a father who learned his daughter was murdered while he argued with the cops. We aren’t free when politicians decide that the lobbyist and gun industries are more important than our children’s freedom to go to school without needing bulletproof backpacks and active shooter drills.

I’m often struck before our games by the lack of delivery of the promise of what our national anthem represents. We stand in honor of a country where we elect representatives to serve us, to thoughtfully consider and enact legislation that protects the interests of all the people in this country and to move this country forward towards the vision of the “shining city on the hill.” But instead, we thoughtlessly link our moment of silence and grief with the equally thoughtless display of celebration for a country that refuses to take up the concept of controlling the sale of weapons used nearly exclusively for the mass slaughter of human beings. We have our moment (over and over), and then we move on without demanding real change from the people we empower to make these changes. We stand, we bow our heads, and the people in power leave on recess, celebrating their own patriotism at every turn.

Kapler gets it right when he says, "We aren’t free when politicians decide that the lobbyist and gun industries are more important than our children’s freedom to go to school without needing bulletproof backpacks and active shooter drills." But by making the national anthem his target Kapler removes the focus away from the politicians beholden to gun lobbyists and manufacturers. It is they who would rather children be killed than enact laws that would keep weapons out of the hands of murderers. It is they who should be on the receiving end of Kapler's scorn rather than a song written more than 200 years ago.

If Kapler sincerely believes that our gun laws are keeping us from being free then he ought to use his public platform to advocate for better laws and elect officials who will enact them. I'm not suggesting this will be easy, but it will ultimately be more constructive. Focusing on the national anthem takes the eye off the prize and is simply unhelpful not only to our public discourse but to the families of those who lost loved ones in Uvalde, Buffalo and far too many other cities in the United States.