Gun violence hits close to home for NBA coach

When Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr assailed Republican senators for failing to take action on gun control following the mass shooting at a Texas elementary school on Wednesday, his emotional plea to ‘‘do something’’ was grounded in personal experience with gun violence.

In 1984, Kerr was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Arizona when his father, Malcolm Kerr, was assassinated by the militant group Islamic Jihad – targeted because he was the president of the American University of Beirut. A caller taking responsibility on behalf of the group told Agence France-Presse that ‘‘not a single American or Frenchman will remain on this soil’’.

Malcolm Kerr, a noted expert on the Arab world, was born in Beirut and lived there as a child. His parents both worked at the university – his father as a biochemist and his mother as dean of women. It was his lifelong ambition to lead the school, after mostly teaching at UCLA.

He had been president for less than two years when he was shot twice in the head in the hallway leading to his office. He was 52.

‘‘The assassination, the first of a prominent civilian American in the current wave of violence here, shocked the country and stirred fears that similar figures might become targets,’’ The Washington Post reported at the time.

Kerr took over the school at a tumultuous time for Lebanon, which was embroiled in a civil war. His predecessor, acting president David Dodge, was kidnapped in July 1982 by pro-Iranian gunmen and taken to Tehran, and released the following July after Syria intervened. In October 1983, a suicide car bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut killed 241 military personnel. The Marines were there as part of a peacekeeping mission, and a few months later, US President Ronald Reagan announced the Marines would withdraw offshore. The university, meanwhile, had been shelled occasionally in the 1970s.

The university had assigned Kerr a bodyguard, but Kerr quickly dismissed him because he thought the university president shouldn’t be walking around campus with a bodyguard. At the time he became president, Israel had invaded the country, and Kerr ‘‘personally stood down an Israeli armoured personnel carrier that crashed through a campus gate,’’ The Washington Post reported.

Steve Kerr was born in Beirut and moved to California as a toddler, but he attended schools overseas for a few years, including in Cairo.

He said in an interview during his college days that basketball helped him cope with the tragedy of losing his father.

‘‘Playing basketball took my thoughts away from what was going on,’’ Kerr said. ‘‘It helped me out. It gave me something to fall back into; it gave me some little time to relax.’’

Kerr mentioned the pain of losing his father after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.

‘‘I know what it feels like,’’ he said at a town-hall-style meeting at the time. ‘‘I know how the Parkland families feel, or the Aurora families, or Sandy Hook,’’ he said, referring to other recent mass shootings.

‘‘I met with some of the families from the Las Vegas shooting . . . It’s awful. It’s devastating. It’s horrible.

‘‘This is pretty simple: Let’s see if we can do something about it. Let’s save some lives.’’

That tone shifted to anger on Wednesday after the latest school shooting, when he said that Republicans opposed legislation to expand background checks because they wanted to hold on to power.

‘‘It’s pathetic! I’ve had enough,’’ he said at a news conference, before storming out of the room.