Jamie Foxx makes urgent appeal to politicians to stop ‘our side versus your side’ mentality on gun violence
Jamie Foxx makes urgent appeal to politicians to stop ‘our side versus your side’ mentality on gun violence and and urges them to come together in the face of tragedy.
MALIBU – Actor Jamie Foxx is urging politicians to table vitriol toward opposing political parties when it comes to gun violence and to come together in the face of tragedy as was seen in the deadly wildfires in California in late 2018.
“You wish that everyone would have cooler heads and just erase the lines in the sand when it comes to politics, and just really get into a room and try to figure out how can we live in our society, protect our rights and protect ourselves and not be so overly ambitious or overly, ‘It’s about our side versus your side,’ Foxx told reporters Sunday at the California Strong Celebrity Softball game at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.
The “Beat Shazam” host addressed the topic of gun violence and last year’s Borderline Bar & Grill shooting in nearby Thousand Oaks before taking the field. He urged policymakers to “adjust” to the times.
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“It doesn’t have to be an argument. It doesn’t even have to get as high as the way I’m speaking right now, but that really troubles you. To live in the fourth safest city in the world and to watch things like that happen — and anywhere it happens,” he said.
“This is the one time I can say in our history that nobody on either side of the political whatever, has taken a step towards saying, ‘Hey, we’re smart enough — how do we prevent these things from happening?’”
Foxx, 51, speaking on the catastrophic mass shooting where a former marine armed with a Glock 21 .45-caliber handgun with an illegal extended magazine opened fire on a packed country music bar, killing 12 people, including a veteran sheriff’s sergeant – expanded on his sentiment telling reporters that just talking about these tragedies during the course of the media cycle isn’t enough.
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“People will say, why don’t you talk about Chicago or why don’t you talk about these other places — wherever it is. If we can do something and make one step towards it – if you think about our life in America, which is the greatest place in the world to live – anytime that something tragic happens, what do we do? We adjust. We adjust,” said Foxx, who added that he hopes the California Strong event "will be not only a day to have fun and raise money for the fires and raise money for those victimized in Thousand Oaks but also another blip on the media cycle to say, ‘Hey, don’t forget about the suffered.”
Foxx was one of the many celebrities who showed up over the weekend to play in an inaugural softball game hosted by California Strong — a non-profit response effort to the recent California tragedies — created by California natives LA Rams’ QB Jared Goff, MLB players Christian Yelich, Ryan Braun and Mike Moustakas, in partnership with the Southeast Ventura County YMCA.
Jamie Foxx attends a charity softball game to benefit "California Strong" at Pepperdine University on January 13, 2019 in Malibu, California. (Rich Polk/Getty Images for California Strong)
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The father of two girls struggled to hold back emotions when asked about the effect the Thousand Oaks shooting and the California wildfires had on himself and his family.
“You can look at #BostonStrong and all of the different places where something tragic has happened, and you just want to be strong,” he lamented. “It just means that I think of people in America and all over the world. I think the will of good people is always strong. We always want to do good. And, it’s sad that a lot of times it takes tragedy to bring us together, but I think if we can hold on to some of this a little more to where it just doesn’t become #CaliforniaStrong, or that’s #BostonStrong because then we become numb to it.
Foxx continued: “California is a resilient place as is every other place that goes through tragedy. And like I said, my whole thing is always keeping the thoughts on the things that are going bad so that we can try to adjust.”
“You see my kid's over there, 10-years-old. What do I tell my daughter [about] how we’re living? What do I tell my oldest daughter [about] how we’re living? I mean, what are we supposed to say? We used to grow up and look at either our government officials or our preachers and feel like, ‘OK, I know they’ve got it.’ What do we say now? So, it’s up to us not to keep looking towards them, but to do everything that we can — raise the money, stay #CaliforniaStrong, stay #BostonStrong, stay #AmericaStrong, stay #TheWorldStrong.”
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