'What place is sacred anymore?': Shooting at Choctaw football game part of larger trend
In Choctaw, players scrambled and fans screamed as gunshots were fired at a high school football game on Friday. A 16-year-old died.
Ninety-five miles to the northeast in Tulsa, Booker T. Washington’s game was suspended after a person brandished a gun, which caused a “brief stampede.”
That same night, in Los Angeles, a school employee was struck by a stray bullet at a high school football game. And across the country, in Georgetown, South Carolina, a game was canceled at halftime when shots were fired from the parking lot.
Not even high school football, as much religion as sport in Oklahoma and other pockets of the country, is immune from senseless acts of gun violence. The events in Choctaw and Tulsa might have been isolated, but the number of such incidents is no less staggering.
According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, there have been 11 shootings at U.S. high school football games this month. And football season just started.
“Unless there’s somebody looking for all of those individual incidents, then you don’t realize in aggregate how many there are,” said David Riedman, who created the K-12 School Shooting Database, which is updated daily based on news reports.
The shooting in Choctaw, during the Choctaw-Del City game, left one dead and several injured. During the chaos, a Del City police officer, working off duty as security, shot a man in the chest.
Del City Police Chief Lloyd Berger said Monday that Del City High School will have extra officers on scene at home football games moving forward.
“I want the public to come out, I want them to enjoy themselves and I want to know that they’re safe, too,” Berger said. “We’ll do everything in our power to make sure that happens.”
But as Riedman’s database shows, acts of gun violence at high school sporting events is not a Del City or Oklahoma problem. Including the incidents in Choctaw and Tulsa on Friday — Tulsa is included despite no shots being fired — there have been 29 acts of gun violence incidents at high school sporting events this year. Last year there were 59.
Among all gun incidents at schools, 16.5% of them happen during sporting events, according to the K-12 database.
David Jackson, executive director of the Oklahoma Secondary Schools Activities Association, said the OSSAA is discussing security measures for the championship events it’s in charge of, but Jackson said each school district, not the OSSAA, is responsible for security at most games.
“We leave it up to them,” Jackson said. “The schools deal with security issues every day … so they don’t need us to tell them how to keep people safe.”
Joshua Harris-Till is the communications lead for the Oklahoma chapter of Moms Demand Action, an organization that fights for stricter gun laws to protect people from gun violence.
Harris-Till’s nephew plays football for Del City and was on the field Friday when shots rang out.
“If I didn’t have this newborn,” Harris-Till said of his baby, “I would’ve been at that game. What if I was sitting in the wrong area? What if I would’ve taken my baby?”
These are questions Harris-Till considered after learning his nephew was OK.
“We already have to think about that in movie theaters, in malls, in Walmart, but for us to also have to think about this at a football game?
“What place is sacred anymore?”
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Shooting at Oklahoma high school football game just part of sad trend
