MOBILE, Ala. -- Jarvis Murphy tried to get away.He joined a fleeing crowd, heard gunshots echo on the stadium concourse, felt a bullet pierce the ground a few inches from his left shoe.He kept running -- toward the exit, toward his car, willing himself forward even as he got a jolt in one leg, then the
He joined a fleeing crowd, heard gunshots echo on the stadium concourse, felt a bullet pierce the ground a few inches from his left shoe.
Murphy became a casualty that evening of an overlooked epidemic of school shootings — the kind that happens after class lets out, the kind that draws little attention despite a national push to fortify schools and protect children. Since mid-August, gunfire has erupted more than 20 times at or near school sporting events around the country, more shootings than took place during school hours.
“There’s a growing problem there and we know that it’s not some spurious thing — it’s something systematic,” said Justin Kurland, a researcher at the University of Southern Mississippi’s National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security. “How many of these have to happen before the schools and first responders start to take this more seriously?”The teachers and students of Jeannette High in western Pennsylvania knew exactly what to do if a gunman ever burst into a classroom.
At many schools, an intensive focus on security during classroom hours has failed to carry over to after-school activities. That has left events without basic prevention measures and students and officials without plans for how to respond. “In an event like this where you expect people to come and have a good time and not have any issues, it’s just one of those things,” said Chief Ron Applin of the Atlanta Public Schools police. “Anybody could get a gun into the stadium, probably.”
But in many cities, schools have waited until after a shooting to improve security. Kurland blamed limited resources — hiring off-duty police officers, buying metal detectors and developing training can cost thousands of dollars — and a baffling lack of awareness about the risks of school events. But shootings at school sporting events are often seen as spillover from daily gun violence in places like St. Louis, which has one of the country’s worst murder rates, and attract less attention and less media coverage.
Federal researchers estimated that about 1,800 children were killed by gunfire in the United States in 2017, and that thousands more were wounded. School sports shootings have been reported in 36 states since 2013, but three-quarters of the incidents have happened in the Midwest and the South.
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