Have we become to tolerant, to intolerance.
An Overlooked Danger: School Shootings After Hours.
By Mitch Smith and Denise LuJan. 6, 2020
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 other.
Outside the stadium, Mr. Murphy fell to the ground. When he rolled up his jeans, he found a gunshot wound below each knee. And the worst pain he had experienced in his 18 years.
“I was scared. I was really scared,” said Mr. Murphy, who was one of nine people shot in August after a high school football game in Mobile. He said he had never worried about someone bringing a gun to a game. “I’ll be cautious everywhere I go now. I’ll be scared something will happen.”
Mr. 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. Since the start of 2013, at least 19 people have been killed and more than 100 wounded in shootings with some connection to school sporting events.
As gunmen have stormed into classroom after classroom during the school day, killing dozens, a stunned country has mobilized to tighten security, prepare children with elaborate drills and pass new legislation. But a pattern of after-school shootings, which have occurred this academic year at a rate of about one a week, has largely gone unnoticed. Sometimes, after linebackers and officials duck for cover from gunshots during a football game, teams even return to the field and go back to playing.
A database from the Naval Postgraduate School, where researchers have compiled the country’s most comprehensive list of school shootings, shows that shootings at school events are a longstanding problem. But efforts to prevent them have been halting, piecemeal and, in some cases, virtually nonexistent.
On some campuses where IDs are required to walk into school and active-shooter drills are standard, after-hours games are still wide open: Anyone who pays a few dollars for a ticket can stroll right in. In Mobile, where metal detectors might have alerted security staff to the gun used to wound Mr. Murphy, the school district only decided after the shooting to buy detectors.
“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?”