Gunfire on the Gridiron: 2023 high school football season
The 'quiet phenomenon' of shootings at school sports kept pace with 2022's record gun violence across the country this fall.
Florida State being left out of the college playoffs shouldn’t be the biggest football related national outrage of this fall. Forty shootings at football games held at K-12 schools should be shocking our national conscience. Instead, we have grown numb—or maybe calloused—to the weekly tragedies. This year was a sadly predictable continuation of 39 shootings at games last season.
Six people were killed and 34 others wounded in and around school football stadiums this season. Most were the result of fights between fans that escalated into shootings. The sound of gunshots ringing out across the field each time sent panic through crowds as students, families, and spectators ran, or even jumped from bleachers, to escape. This livestreamed video from the Choctaw High School in Oklahoma captured the chaos on August 25 when a student was killed and 3 others wounded in the stands during the 3rd quarter of this game.
Regional Differences
Exactly half of the shootings took place in the South. While this number of incidents is disproportionally high compared to population or geographic distribution of schools, there are regional differences in attendance to high school football games. Both college and high school football are the “pride and joy of the South,” meaning that almost everyone in a small community might be in attendance for the Friday Night Lights. A large communal gathering can became a flashpoint for violence.
Locations of these shootings also align with a recent study by the Drexel University Urban Health Collaborative. Even with a small sample size of 40 incidents, amazingly, there were shootings at high school games in all 10 of the highest gun violence rate cities.
These findings suggest that disputes that escalate into shootings at games are a byproduct of large community gatherings where tensions between armed people can flare rather than gun violence with a motive tied to the school itself. Regardless of the cause, when a shooting does happen, it still becomes the school’s problem to deal with. The consequences for students, staff, and their families were subsequent events like the homecoming dances getting cancelled, future games being played without fans, and millions of dollars being spent on stadium security instead of education.
Outpacing time periods during the school day
These shootings at sporting events are not rare or isolated incidents. When the school day is broken into common time periods (e.g., morning classes, lunch, dismissal, after school), sporting events are the most common time period in 2023.
Looking at my entire dataset of +2,600 incidents from 1966-present, this year is a marginally increasing continuation of a trend across six decades. These shootings at school sporting events have historically been one of the most common time periods.
National Media Coverage
In early August, I had a production meeting with the senior editors to NBC News to talk about school safety issues they should be monitoring for the 2023 school year. I said that shootings at high school games aren’t getting national attention. By mid-September, 16 shootings at games was a headline story.
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.”
Riedman, who for statistical simplicity defines a high school football season as running from August through November, said violence at the games is not limited to southern and midwestern states where gun laws tend to be lax.
“This happens all over the country,” he said. “Recently there were two students who were shot leaving a game in Chicago.”
And, so far, the violence appears to be following a predictable pattern, Riedman said.
“It’s almost always a dispute that escalates into violence because somebody has a gun,” he said. “What has not happened yet is a planned attack on a high school football game.”
What, besides guns, do all these incidents have in common? Insufficient security, Riedman said.
“The fundamental problem is security,” he said. “It’s often unclear who is responsible for security at high school football games. Most schools have never done a training session at a stadium.”
“Police aren’t trained for handling a shooting in a stadium,” Riedman said. “When there are gunshots, they’re often accompanied by confusion and sometimes innocent bystanders get hurt. It’s also very hit-or-miss with security screenings. In Choctaw, they had screenings at the start of the game but that was it. So somebody could have left the stadium and come back with a gun.”
Final Two Minute Drill
Just like a pass that falls short on 4th down as the clock expires, this article has an anti-climatic, depressing ending.
Even if communities across the country demand more security, we do not have the budget or infrastructure to secure high school stadiums in the same manner as Division 1 football or NFL games. The NCAA and University of Alabama won’t risk a shooting on game day disrupting $214 million in revenue. High schools are operating their entire athletics department - including stadium operations - on $600,000 per year (which already outpaces core curriculum spending).
Even with a bigger budget, seamless physical security at high schools also isn’t practical or feasible. Patrolling the entire fenceline, parking lot, and searching 2,000 fans at typical high school game could easily take 200 security personnel to absolutely ensure there is no weapon present. In a small town, there aren’t 200 extra police officers and trained security personnel available. Even if there were, they probably want to watch (or even coach) the game more than patrol the parking lot. Physical security for most large outdoor venues is just not practical.
This leaves us with the reality that there were the same number of shootings this year as last year. They happened most frequently in the same areas of the country that are already struggling to address gun violence. When high school games aren’t securable, there will probably be 40 more shootings next season.
When a team that’s trending in the wrong direction has back to back losing seasons, the coach gets fired. America needs start looking for someone with a whole new gameplan to stop this gun violence at schools.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.