One nation under guns

Shooting near football game shows how gun violence infects our communities

Green Run High School in Virginia Beach was leading its football game against Kempsville High School last week when gunfire in a nearby neighborhood sent players, coaches and fans scurrying for cover. The game was suspended, then prematurely concluded, in the interest of safety.

The story is as terrifying and infuriating as it is commonplace in this country, a nation awash with guns. It is the predictable manifestation of our stubborn refusal to limit access to firearms or to treat gun violence as the public health crisis it so evidently is.

It would be reassuring to think that Thursday night’s events at Kempsville high were an outlier, a rare instance in which violence from the community spills over into a school setting. It differs from the sort of planned attack witnessed in countless schools across the nation in the last 25 years.

The shooting didn’t take place on school grounds, but rather in the neighborhood adjacent to the campus. Authorities said three people — ages 16, 19 and 19 — were wounded on John Smith

Court though they did not believe it was connected to the football game.

That’s little comfort for all in attendance — for the players who spent the weeks preceding the game practicing in grueling conditions, the coaches who work so hard to prepare their young men to achieve, and for the families and spectators whose night at the stadium descended into fear and terror.

“It’s very heartbreaking because kids on both teams worked so hard to get to this point,” Green Run coach Brandon Williams told sports columnist Larry Rubama. “And to have someone take it away from them that wasn’t involved in the game, you know, that’s a hard thing to take.”

It’s also heartbreaking how gun violence affects the whole community. Many of those in attendance on Thursday night will be traumatized by the experience, even though students knew what to do given their lifetime of active shooter drills and shelter-in-place experience.

And that’s to say nothing of those involved in the shooting itself — those harmed and those responsible, along with their families and friends. Lives will be inexorably changed, and some ruined, by what happened that evening.

Even more tragic is the fact that

Virginia Beach wasn’t the only community where violence, or its threat, transpired during the first weekend of high school football.

In Choctaw, Oklahoma, on Friday night, a 16-year-old boy was killed and four others were injured during a shooting at a high school football game. KOCO News in Oklahoma City reported that three people were shot on the visitor’s side of the stadium; two other students were injured trying to flee.

In Stafford County, also on Friday night, social media posts threatening violence prompted the cancellation of Stafford High School’s football game against James Monroe High School. Stafford was forced to forfeit and the contest is not expected to be rescheduled.

Then on Monday, only a week into a new semester, a graduate student at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shot and killed an associate professor in the applied physical sciences department, sending the campus into lockdown. Panicked students traded fearful text messages and even jumped from secondfloor windows to escape.

Have we grown so numb to gun violence that episodes such as this prompt no community reflection, no collective outrage and no resolve to take action? Surely our children deserve better than to have their high school years marred by gunshots and lockdown drills.

We sentence them to that fate when we fail to adopt strong laws that keep firearms away from the dangerous and policies that treat gun violence as a public health issue. This will continue, and worsen, for as long as we allow it.

We can choose a future in which the play on a high school football field and the joy in the stands, rather than the terror of gunshots, are what people take home with them at night. This can be the moment, if we seize it.