'I've had enough': Steve Kerr pleads for gun control in emotional speech after Texas school shooting

Steve Kerr called senators "pathetic" in the impassioned address before storming out of the press conference.

Golden State Warriors' Steve Kerr delivered an impassioned plea to crack down on gun violence as he branded US senators' inaction "pathetic".

The head coach of the NBA team broke down as he used what should have been a press conference about his team's game that night to call for greater gun control following Tuesday's mass shooting at a primary school in Texas.

Kerr said he did not want to talk about basketball following the tragedy at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, which left 19 children and two adults, including a teacher, dead.

"In the last 10 days, we've had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we've had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California, and now we have children murdered at school," he told the press briefing in Dallas.

"When are we going to do something?

"I'm tired. I'm so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there... I'm tired of the moments of silence. Enough."

He directly pleaded with senators "who refuse to do anything about the violence in school and supermarket shootings" to mandate background checks for gun purchases.

"There's 50 Senators right now who refuse to vote on HR8, which is a background check rule that the House passed a couple years ago. It's been sitting there for two years," he said.

"And there's a reason they won't vote on it: to hold onto power... 

"Are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children and our elderly and our churchgoers?"

He urged "every person" listening to the press briefing - which came before his team faced the Dallas Mavericks in Game 4 of the Western Conference finals - to think about their relatives, adding: "How would you feel if this happened to you today?”

The massacre at the school in Uvalde, a town with a large Latin community, was the deadliest shooting at a US grade school since a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, almost a decade ago.

It came less than two weeks after a gunman opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 Black shoppers and workers in what officials have described as a hate crime.

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