Get ready for shootings at high school football games
When the 'Friday night lights' turn on this fall, a sad reality is there will be gunfire on the gridiron at 30-40 high schools across the country. Few (if any) of these schools will have a plan.
High school football on Friday nights is supposed to be one of the most unifying traditions in American life as teens live out their dreams of being stars on the field. Yet across the country, gunfire turns their dream into a nightmare with alarming regularity. It’s hard to believe but I’ve recorded 388 shootings during sports games on k-12 school campuses.
To open the 2025-26 season, shots were fired Friday night at Southeast Raleigh High during a fight between teens during a football jamboree.
Even when this is a well document problem that happens each fall, it’s only getting worse. As I told ESPN three seasons ago, shootings at school sporting events surged to 171 incidents over the past decade, with 22 people killed and 171 wounded.
In 2021, there was a shooting at a high school football game somewhere in the country for twelve consecutive weeks. When I was interviewed by NBC National News two years ago, the 2023 season kept pace. The data shows this isn’t random or rare—it’s become a predictable feature of the high school football calendar.
The majority of shootings linked to high school football games don’t happen under the stadium lights. Shots are usually fired just outside the stadium fence, most often in the parking lot where fans from both teams are congregating before and after the game.
These are crowded, loosely controlled spaces where a dispute can boil over and turn into gunfire. Even if there is security at the stadium gate, it’s easy for someone to leave a gun inside their car and grab it during a fight in the parking lot after the game.
Just like most shootings on campus—and more broadly in public places like grocery stores and shopping malls—escalations of disputes are the overwhelming cause of these incidents. These aren’t carefully planned attacks, they’re just simple arguments that turn lethal because someone in the crowd is carrying a gun.
Most perpetrators at football game shootings fell into two categories: nonstudents attending games and students. In many communities (especially rural areas in the South and Midwest), high school football games are very important and well-attended events that draw the entire community to the school. This also means that two people or groups who had issues all summer might be sitting next to each other in the stands.
These games draw not only the student body but also alumni, parents, siblings, and entire neighborhoods, creating a large mix of people who can come into conflict with each other.
The most common victims are also students and nonstudents attending or using athletic facilities which mirrors the shooter affiliation breakdown. Students, unsurprisingly, were most frequently targeted (or bystanders in the line of fire), followed by spectators or unaffiliated individuals.
As I told Mercury News, the number of shootings at sporting events had reached double pre-pandemic levels with one in six school shootings taking place at a sporting event, most often at football games. While school officials prepare for shootings during the school day while students are sitting in a classroom, they rarely have a plan for what happens when shots are fired under the ‘Friday night lights’.
2023 Football Season - NBC News
Gun violence is threatening to dim Friday night lights and endangering a beloved national pastime — high school football games.
This season alone, there have already been at least 16 shootings, resulting in two deaths and 13 people wounded at games across the country, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, which has been tracking this data since the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
“I would call it an alarming trend,” David Riedman, a criminologist and founder of the database, told NBC News. “Right now, it appears we’re on pace with last year when there was at least one shooting at a football game each week on the season.”
Friday night lights under fire: High school football games are being blitzed by gun violence
2022 Football Season - ESPN
Over the past decade, shootings occurred at school sporting events at least 171 times, leaving 22 people dead and 171 wounded, according to The K-12 School Shooting Database. During the 2021 football season, there was at least one shooting at a high school game somewhere in the country for 12 consecutive weeks, according to the database, which is assembled from news reports from around the country.
In total, 2021 saw 38 incidents where six people died and 35 were wounded. This year is on pace to be the most violent yet, with 37 shootings as of Sept. 28 that have left three dead and 34 injured. As recently as 2014, the database recorded just nine such cases for the year.
"When you have a shooting at a game, you have all the same challenges you face with one of those indiscriminate attacks but there is no victims fund and there is no massive funding package from the state," said David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database. "When one of these 'lesser' school shootings happens, you have all the same challenges with none of the help."
'A quiet phenomenon': The rise of gun violence at school sports
2023 Football Season - Mercury News
This year, there have been 39 school shootings at high school sporting events nationwide, according to David Riedman, a data scientist who founded the K-12 School Shooting Database.
With football season not yet at its midpoint and basketball season still to come, this year’s total could end up around 60. That is more than twice the pre-pandemic total of 25 in 2019, and six times more than a decade ago, Riedman said.
Riedman, who was working at a Homeland Security think-tank in Washington, D.C, when he began tracking cases, estimates that one in six school shootings takes place at sporting events. Most often, it’s a football game.
“What’s interesting is that almost all of these shootings at sporting events are disputes that escalate into a shooting,” he said. “So it’s not somebody who was planning to commit a shooting that night. It’s somebody that when there was an altercation because they were armed, it turned into a shooting.
“That’s a similar trend to a pattern during school-day shootings as well. They’re not planned attacks. They’re fights. What seems to be different is there are more teenagers with guns than a decade ago. And habitually carrying a gun with them.”
Riedman cautioned that school officials and metal detectors aren’t enough. He said schools need emergency action plans at sporting events, too.
Said Riedman: “If you just take a halfway approach of, ‘Maybe we’ll put a couple metal detectors and some random officers,’ that doesn’t do much for a crowd of a couple thousand.
“Schools do extensive training for your indiscriminate shooter coming in during the school day when kids are in classrooms. Most schools have never done any training or have a written plan for what they’re going to do if there’s a shooting at a football game.”
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.