Gunfire continues at high school football games across the country
Gunfire continues at high school football games across the country
School sports events--especially high school football--have become one of the most common times for a shooting on campus. This pattern is different from shootings at schools from 1966-2009.
Every week of the high school football season since 2022, gunfire has sent the crowd running before, during, or after a high school game.
On the K-12 School Shooting Database website, you can filter by time period (e.g., morning classes, lunch, dismissal, sports event) and see an interactive map of the shooting at sports events, or any other time period.
On Friday night in New Jersey, a 15- and 16-year-old were shot outside the gates of the football field at Passaic County Technical Institute. A 16-year-old has been arrested for multiple crimes including attempted murder.
One block off campus in Cleveland (not included in the K-12 School Shooting Database because the shooting was not on school property), a 17-year-old boy was fatally shot and four teenage victims were injured about an hour after the end of the Euclid High School football game Friday night.
Gunshots fired at a nearby business in Turtle Creek, PA on Friday night caused a crowd stampede and forced the suspension of the Woodland Hills-Penn Hills football game. Shots were fired at a pharmacy down the street and heard by the crowd at the school. That’s when chaos ensued as spectators began running for the exits. “It did cause the students to freak out, and rightfully so, when they heard the shots,” the mayor told KDKA-TV. “And more or less what I understand, it was a stampede of people getting out of the stadium.” The game was called in the fourth quarter and the stadium was evacuated.
In Alabama, a football game between Tallassee High School and Elmore County High School was called off midgame. The premises were evacuated after halftime due to a threat of gun violence that led school officials and law enforcement to postpone the game.
In a strange football adjacent situation, someone has shot the scoreboard with a rifle in the football stadium at Wood River Rural High School in Nebraska four different days since April. The most recent shooting was Monday August 26 at 11am and caused $10,000 in damage to the scoreboard. Police in the small town of 1,100 residents don’t have any suspects.
On August 16, the stadium was evacuated after a man fired shots into the air outside the Laney High School football game in Augusta, GA.
Three days later on August 19, a 43-year-old man was shot while breaking up a fight between teens at Bossier High School in Louisiana outside the football stadium during Spirit Night.
Las Vegas police conducting weapons screenings on Friday, Aug. 16 at Legacy High School during a home football game arrested four different people with concealed handguns trying to enter the stadium. In the first two weeks of the school year, nine arrests have been made for guns at Las Vegas schools.
2023 Football Season - NBC News
Gun violence is threatening to dim Friday night lights and endangering a beloved national pastime — high school football games.
This season alone, there have already been at least 16 shootings, resulting in two deaths and 13 people wounded at games across the country, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, which has been tracking this data since the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
“I would call it an alarming trend,” David Riedman, a criminologist and founder of the database, told NBC News. “Right now, it appears we’re on pace with last year when there was at least one shooting at a football game each week on the season.”
Friday night lights under fire: High school football games are being blitzed by gun violence
2022 Football Season - ESPN
Over the past decade, shootings occurred at school sporting events at least 171 times, leaving 22 people dead and 171 wounded, according to The K-12 School Shooting Database. During the 2021 football season, there was at least one shooting at a high school game somewhere in the country for 12 consecutive weeks, according to the database, which is assembled from news reports from around the country.
In total, 2021 saw 38 incidents where six people died and 35 were wounded. This year is on pace to be the most violent yet, with 37 shootings as of Sept. 28 that have left three dead and 34 injured. As recently as 2014, the database recorded just nine such cases for the year.
"When you have a shooting at a game, you have all the same challenges you face with one of those indiscriminate attacks but there is no victims fund and there is no massive funding package from the state," said David Riedman, a criminologist and founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database. "When one of these 'lesser' school shootings happens, you have all the same challenges with none of the help."
'A quiet phenomenon': The rise of gun violence at school sports
2023 Football Season - Mercury News
This year, there have been 39 school shootings at high school sporting events nationwide, according to David Riedman, a data scientist who founded the K-12 School Shooting Database.
With football season not yet at its midpoint and basketball season still to come, this year’s total could end up around 60. That is more than twice the pre-pandemic total of 25 in 2019, and six times more than a decade ago, Riedman said.
Riedman, who was working at a Homeland Security think-tank in Washington, D.C, when he began tracking cases, estimates that one in six school shootings takes place at sporting events. Most often, it’s a football game.
“What’s interesting is that almost all of these shootings at sporting events are disputes that escalate into a shooting,” he said. “So it’s not somebody who was planning to commit a shooting that night. It’s somebody that when there was an altercation because they were armed, it turned into a shooting.
“That’s a similar trend to a pattern during school-day shootings as well. They’re not planned attacks. They’re fights. What seems to be different is there are more teenagers with guns than a decade ago. And habitually carrying a gun with them.”
Riedman cautioned that school officials and metal detectors aren’t enough. He said schools need emergency action plans at sporting events, too.
Said Riedman: “If you just take a halfway approach of, ‘Maybe we’ll put a couple metal detectors and some random officers,’ that doesn’t do much for a crowd of a couple thousand.
“Schools do extensive training for your indiscriminate shooter coming in during the school day when kids are in classrooms. Most schools have never done any training or have a written plan for what they’re going to do if there’s a shooting at a football game.”
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.