NBA COMMISSIONER Adam Silver has backed players who wore  T-shirts with “Enough” written on them, in the wake of last week’s bar shooting in California.

On Sunday, Los Angeles Lakers and Atlanta Hawks players repeated the gesture made by Los Angeles Clippers and Milwaukee Bucks players the previous night by wearing the T-shirts, which also featured the names of the 12 people killed last Wednesday when a gunman opened fire at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, about 40 miles away from Los Angeles.

“As I’ve always said, our players aren’t just ballplayers, they’re citizens,” Silver told US TV sports network ESPN after the Lakers-Hawks game at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles. “They have strong feelings about what’s happening in society and they react to them. I think this was something that was a groundswell within the league. It came from the players and it spread by word of mouth from one team to another.

“It obviously began here in California and other teams around the league supported them. Again, I support our players’ desire to speak out on issues that are important to them and important to society.”

LeBron James, the Lakers forward who has used his status as the widely considered best player in the world to speak out on several social issues, said he felt a mixture of outrage and disbelief when he heard about the shootings.

“Probably the same that went through everybody’s mind, ‘Not again’ or ‘Wow. What the hell?’” James told ESPN. “Probably some more explicit terms that I won’t say right here. It’s just how do we clean up this It all comes back to this gun situation that we have in America and gun violence. We know that these people are just being able to go and buy guns and do things with them and innocent lives are being taken at young ages.

“When I was younger, we didn’t really have to worry about gun violence too much. I mean, if you had a problem with somebody you kind of fist it out and move on. And now, it’s like people are like shooting it out and don’t even have a problem with somebody. They just got a problem with themselves or a problem with the situation that they’re in.”