ESPN personality Elle Duncan urged viewers on Wednesday to not “grow numb” to the recent string of mass shootings in the U.S. and to look at the victims and imagine they are their own loved ones.
During her nightly “SportsCenter” broadcast on Wednesday, Duncan described the “sense of dread” she felt dropping her own 4-year-old daughter off at school that morning.
“We put our kids to bed at night and we have an expectation that they’re going to make it to morning right under our protection and love, only to send them into a reality where you just have to hope they’re faster to the hiding places than the other kids at school,” she added. “You know, good luck.”
“If we won’t do anything else to protect the innocents from the reality that we have created for them, then we owe them, at the very least, the respect of acknowledgement, no matter how disruptive to our peace of mind,” an emotional Duncan said, attempting to hold back tears.
“So please, I implore you — and I mean it — look at them. And then look at everyone in the room with you, and imagine it’s their faces on that screen.”
“LOOK AT THEM,” she wrote in a tweet with the clip.
Duncan’s remarks come after 19 schoolchildren and two teachers were killed and 17 other people were injured on Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas, when a gunman opened fire inside of a fourth grade classroom at Robb Elementary School.
Duncan described the U.S. as “a society that makes willingness to stand in front of an assault rifle a job requirement for a fourth grade teacher who, by the way, is making 30 grand a year,” referring to Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia, the teachers who lost their lives protecting their students.
Duncan, who has become a prominent host for ESPN in recent years, also garnered attention and acclaim for her eulogy for basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna, who were among the nine people killed in a helicopter crash in January 2020.
The shooting in Uvalde came 10 days after a mass shooting at a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store, in which the suspected shooter allegedly sought to kill as many Black people as possible.
The Uvalde shooting is the deadliest school shooting since a gunman shot and killed 26 students and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.