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Gabe Kapler pens essay, says he won’t observe national anthem, ‘until I feel better about the direction of our country’

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In the wake of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which claimed the lives of 19 schoolchildren and 2 teachers, Giants manager Gabe Kapler expressed a deep frustration with the state of our nation.

Before the Giants’ 10-game road trip, Kapler penned a blog post entitled “Home of the Brave?”

In that post, Kapler assessed the United States as no longer being a free country, saying on Twitter, “We’re not the land of the free nor the home of the brave right now.”

He criticizes the police officers in Uvalde who arrived on scene within two minutes of the shooting, but let the gunman go unharmed for 77 minutes and handcuffed a mother who jumped a fence and rescued her own children.

“We weren’t given bravery, and we aren’t free,” Kapler writes. “The police on the scene put a mother in handcuffs as she begged them to go in and save her children. They blocked parents trying to organize to charge in to stop the shooter, including a father who learned his daughter was murdered while he argued with the cops. We aren’t free when politicians decide that the lobbyist and gun industries are more important than our children’s freedom to go to school without needing bulletproof backpacks and active shooter drills.”

Kapler takes issue with the repetitiveness of the cycle of gun violence and the recycling of “thoughts and prayers” followed by governmental inaction.

After uploading that post, Kapler spoke to reporters and told them he would not observe the national anthem.

“I don’t plan on coming out for the anthem going forward until I feel better about the direction of our country,” Kapler said. “That will be the step. I don’t expect it to move the needle necessarily. It’s just something that I feel strongly enough about to take that step.”

In his post, Kapler maligned the fact that he stood for the national anthem at the Giants’ last game and made it evident he would express himself in some form of protest going forward.

“I am not okay with the state of this country,” Kapler wrote. “I wish I hadn’t let my discomfort compromise my integrity. I wish that I could have demonstrated what I learned from my dad, that when you’re dissatisfied with your country, you let it be known through protest. The home of the brave should encourage this.”