The New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays dedicated their social media accounts to gun violence awareness on Thursday night, collaborating to publish a series of facts in place of regular game coverage as the teams met at Tropicana Field.
“In lieu of game coverage and in collaboration with the Tampa Bay Rays, we will be using our channels to offer facts about the impacts of gun violence,” the Yankees tweeted. “The devastating events that have taken place in Uvalde, Buffalo and countless other communities across our nation are tragedies that are intolerable.”
The Rays also made a $50,000 commitment to the support fund for Everytown for Gun Safety, the “largest gun violence protection organization in America,” the team said.
The collaboration, which included posts on Twitter and Instagram, came two days after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. On May 14, a gunman killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y.
“This cannot become normal,” the Rays said in a statement. “We cannot become numb. We cannot look the other way. “We all know, if nothing changes, nothing changes.”
Among the facts the Yankees and Rays published during Thursday’s game:
- Every day, more than 110 Americans are killed with guns, and more than 200 are shot and injured.
- Firearms were the leading cause of death for American children and teens in 2020.
- 58 percent of American adults or someone they care for have experienced gun violence.
- An average of 4,500 veterans die by firearm suicide every year – about 12 veterans each day.
- Every three hours, a young Black man dies by gun homicide.
- Each year, more than 4,100 Latinx people die from gun violence in the U.S. and 13,300 are shot and wounded.
- About 4.5 million women in the U.S. today report having been threatened with a gun by an intimate partner.
The teams cited the Center for Disease Control, SurveyUSA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Annals of Internal Medicine and the National Library of Medicine for statistics.
(Photo: Douglas P. DeFelice / Getty Images)
