by Riley Blankenship

This past week, NBC News came out with an article detailing the statistics regarding the sad but uprising growth of shootings at high school football games on Friday nights. NBC News points out that this season alone, there have been more than 16 shootings. According to the k-12 school shooting database, there have been two deaths and 13 injured as a result of these. Despite the already high number of shootings, law enforcement has intercepted a few planned shootings, such as when high school students from a Dallas suburb were planning an attack at an Everman High School football game. Luckily, this attack was stopped before a tragedy could occur.  

I am an activist for the end of school shootings. As a student attending college where football is a cherished pastime for many, this brings many worries and concerns for this college’s team and moreover for this community and its other sports teams. I have noticed that after any tragic event, universities heighten security for a month or so but then seem to go back to a normal life like nothing ever happened.  In my opinion, this is totally absurd. My question along with many is why are we not doing more to prevent this? 

I believe one way to combat these tragedies is to talk with athletes more and help to come up with a better gameplan in case of a shooting. Nobody thinks a shooter is going to disrupt a game on a Friday or Saturday night until it happens to their school. While finding information for this article, I found there is not a single article discussing ways to combat football game shootings. The only articles I did find were headlines reporting on the different shooting around the United States.  

I find this very tragic and heartbreaking as an activist. It leads me to question so many things regarding how the government is handling these situations. This is a serious problem for America and in my opinion, needs to be taken more seriously. Far too many are losing their lives because of this sick act.