Cam Newton wearing Steelers-themed cleats to honor victims of Pittsburgh synagogue massacre

Thursday night’s game between the Carolina Panthers and Pittsburgh Steelers is a massive matchup between two teams with legitimate hopes of facing off again in the Super Bowl.

But that’s not stopping Cam Newton from looking at the bigger picture.

Newton’s cleats honor victims of mass shooting

The Panthers quarterback is suiting up with black and gold cleats featuring images from the Steelers logo. The shoes also display the Star of David and read “Stronger than hate” and “Hatred can’t weaken a city of steel” to honor the memory of the 11 dead and multiple others wounded in an Oct. 28 massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Another shooting, another reaction

Newton’s tribute is the latest in what’s become a familiar reaction from the sports world to the plague of mass shootings that continue to claim lives in the United States with little action taken to stop them.

Just today, LeBron James and Jared Goff joined an outpouring of reaction from the sports world to the murder of 12 people at a Los Angeles-area night club early Thursday morning.

Americans are used to this

These gestures of support come from a good place and raise awareness to a problem that was once shocking to the American people but has become commonplace to a numbed public desensitized to the normalization of gun violence.

Viewed from a distance, it’s absurd that this is a society where a football player wearing tributes to murder victims on his cleats is a normal thing.

But it has become normal. The fact that a society that often values gun rights over everything else has allowed that to be so is a travesty.

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Jason Owens is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter.