New York Knicks star Carmelo Anthony pushed for stronger gun control measures on Wednesday after news broke that his teammate Cleanthony Early had been shot in the knee and robbed in Queens earlier that day.
"We got to do something," Anthony said when asked whether the situation illustrated the need for gun control. "You feel it. I felt it in Baltimore, in that situation, the Freddie Gray situation, and I'm feeling it now with a teammate of mine that’s much closer."
"It's just something that we have to do," he continued. "We've got to figure it out. I don't know how we figure it out. I don't have the answers. I'm pretty sure a lot of people are working on trying to figure that out. But we have to do something."
Anthony has become something of an advocate against police brutality and gun violence this year. In April, he walked alongside demonstrators in Baltimore to protest the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who died while in police custody, sparking national outcry. This month, Anthony, along with Stephen Curry, Chris Paul and various survivors of gun violence and their families, participated in an anti-gun violence PSA that aired on Christmas.
"The gun should never be an option," Anthony said in that video.
That same day the announcement aired, 27 people were killed as a result of gun violence, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Altogether, an average of 36 people died in the U.S. every day in 2015 because of gun violence.
On Wednesday, Anthony said he was thinking of Early's mother after he heard the Knicks forward had been shot. "For his mom to have to wake up to that text, that call... no parent should have to go through that," he said.
This is the second attack on a Knicks player in less than a month. Anthony and Early's teammate Derrick Williams was robbed of $750,000 worth of jewelry after taking two women back to his home from Manhattan's Meatpacking District.
“It’s scary, man," Anthony said. "This goes back two years when I was in Denver [with the Nuggets]. I had a teammate, Julius Hodge, that was in a situation when I was out there [Hodge was shot in a drive-by shooting]. I was there when the Broncos player [Darrent Williams] got killed on New Year's [in a drive-by]."
“A lot of these things, you really don’t put two and two together until you hear an incident and you start to remember, ‘This happened and that happened and that happened,'" he continued. "So as athletes -- anybody, not just athletes, but people with some type of stature or money, who have something going on for themselves -- we just have to figure out a way to be better, be safer, know our surroundings, know where we’re at, know who is with us, know who is not with us.”
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