Keeler: Nuggets coach Michael Malone was right not to “stick to sports” after Super Bowl parade shooting. “How many more people have to die?”

Michael Malone just lived a parade. He’s headed to Kansas City soon to watch his daughter play in a volleyball tourney there. Stick to sports? After what he saw on television Wednesday afternoon? No way.

“I haven’t heard the details, what kind of guns or weapons were used in this case,” the Nuggets coach said before his team tipped off against the Sacramento Kings at Ball Arena on Wednesday night. “People just can’t go buy a gun or an assault rifle and go kill people. I mean, how many more people have to die before we change that?”

Too many.

But one is too many. It’s always too many. The First Amendment and the Second have forever been tricky, bickering bedfellows. A toast to the first responders who protect the innocent, the threads that keep a fraught populace from unraveling. But can we also agree that thoughts and prayers won’t bring back the poor soul killed in the shooting near Kansas City’s Union Station that followed the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory parade?

That even during an age of weaponized divisiveness, where sports are covered like politics and politics are covered like sports, that when defenseless children are shot during a celebration of community pride … it might also be about the guns? At least a little?

Can we say that part out loud?

Malone did. And he’s not alone, either.

“We all say it over and over and over again, ‘Something has to be done,'” said Malone, who went through similar emotions in the Ball Arena interview room four-and-a-half years ago after a shooting rocked STEM School Highlands Ranch, not far from his family’s home.

“I’m not a politician. I don’t know what the answers are. But I do feel for everybody, where it’s such a joyous occasion turned into a nightmare. And I heard that some of the children, some of the 20 people that were shot, were young kids. And that makes it even that much more heartbreaking for all those people.”

Full disclosure: I’m married to a Kansas City girl. I used to live and work there. I’ve taken my family to Union Station. I know people who were on-site, from Chiefs staffers and media to family and longtime friends. You can say Malone’s take on firearms isn’t in his job description. But neither is hugging a teenager who’d just scraped his head trying to get clear of gunfire, which Kansas City coach Andy Reid reportedly found himself having to do Wednesday.

The Nuggets, like the Avs here and the Chiefs there, are in the middle of a title window. More parades are coming. So I asked Malone if he worried that an incident such as the one in Kansas City could change how we celebrate championships going forward. Are we at risk of losing another unifying moment as a city, a community, a state?

“That’s where … the people that we put in power and our (elected officials), whether it’s locally or nationally, they’ve got to do a better job of finding a way to not make all these (possible),” the coach replied. “And again, that’s not my job. My job is to coach. But I do have feelings. I am a parent, and I am a member of this great nation. We have to do a much better job than we have.”

The longer nothing gets done, the longer nothing changes. Malone’s lived a parade. Whatever your political team of choice, he’s right on one thing. Nobody should ever have to die at one.

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