A US basketball coach delivered an impassioned plea to lawmakers in the wake of the gun massacre at a Texas school.

Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr refused to talk about basketball before the San Francisco team’s playoff game against the Mavericks after 19 children and two teachers were shot dead by an 18-year-old gunman.

“Since we left shoot-around, 14 (sic) children were killed 400 miles from here and a teacher. And in the last 10 days, we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in southern California, and now we have children murdered at school.”

The suspected gunman, who was later shot dead by officers, abandoned his vehicle and entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas with a handgun and possibly a rifle, governor Greg Abbott said.

This comes nearly a decade after a gunman killed 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary.

An emotional Kerr slammed the press conference table several times as he said: “When are we going to do something? I’m tired, I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there. I’m tired of the moments of silence.”

And in a direct appeal to senators, he added: “So I ask you, Mitch McConnell, I ask all of you senators who refuse to do anything about the violence and school shootings and supermarket shootings I ask you—are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children and our elderly and our churchgoers because that’s what it looks like.

“How would you feel if this happened to you today? We can’t get numb to this,” he said. “We can’t sit here and just read about it and go, ‘Well, let’s have a moment of silence. Yeah, go dubs. Come on, Mavs, let’s go.’ That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go play a basketball game.”