Another Deadly HBCU Football Weekend, and Another Reason to Rethink Gun Control – Bearing Arms

Almost 70,000 football fans packed Birmingham’s Legion Field on Saturday evening to watch Alabama A&M and Alabama State square off in the Magic City Classic, and they got one heck of a game. Alabama A&M held on to win 31-28, and the outcome of the game wasn’t assured until the final minute or so. 

The majority of headlines from Birmingham on Sunday morning, though, weren’t about the game itself, but what happened afterward. About an hour after the game wrapped up, two shootings outside of Legion Field left one person dead and eight others wounded; the latest in a string of violence connected to Historically Black Colleges and Universities and their football games. 

Police Chief Michael Pickett said most spectators and families had already left the stadium property when shots rang out. The shooting, he said, happened nearby, where vendors were set up along Graymont Avenue.

Pickett said it was a “completely senseless act of violence” and that he was “very grateful that more people weren’t injured.”

“This is something that we not only just see here in Birmingham, but we see it all over the nation,” he said. “And it’s important that we, as a community, address this issue.”

There were at least five shootings at or near HBCU football games in just the past month, starting with a shooting at Delaware State University on October 10 that resulted in one person killed and one person injured. 

On October 24, a shooting at Virginia Union University’s homecoming resulted in one person being seriously injured and the alleged shooter suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That same evening, 11 people were shot outside of the Florida A&M homecoming game in Tallahassee. 

Then there were the two shootings in Birmingham, Alabama on Halloween. 

I haven’t found any reports of comparable shootings at non-HBCU college football games during October, which is actually in line with research from the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety. Earlier this year the outfit released a report on “gun violence” on college and university campuses, and found that HBCUs “experienced shootings at a rate 20 times that of non-HBCUs.” That’s in general, not just at or near football games, but it does appear that there’s a glaring disparity in those specific locations too. 

According to Everytown, the vast majority of the shooters in these incidents aren’t students. At the moment, just one person has been taken into custody in relation to the Birmingham shootings, and they’ve not yet been officially charged with anything; a 17-year-old allegedly caught with an illegally modified handgun. A 15-year-old, meanwhile, is facing charges as an adult in the shooting at Florida A&M, 

These arrests raise an uncomfortable, but important, question. If the people responsible for these shootings aren’t students, and the violence is taking place outside stadiums or in the neighborhoods surrounding these schools, what exactly are university administrators supposed to do to prevent it?

For Everytown, the answer starts with gun control. Among the ideas offered in Everytown’s report are prohibiting campus carry, imposing “red flag” laws and universal background checks, raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21, and enacting draconian gun storage laws. 

Of course, several of these schools do prohibit firearms on campus. I suppose those schools can install metal detectors and hire additional security officers, but unless there’s only one or two secured entrances to campus it will still be possible to sneak in a gun. And none of those measures will do much good when the shooting takes place on a public street and the people pulling the triggers have no connection to the university.

Many of the suspects believed to be responsible for these shootings can’t legally own a gun either. The 17-year-old detained in Birmingham was allegedly carrying a handgun illegally modified to fire automatically. The 15-year-old accused in the Tallahassee shooting was already too young to lawfully purchase a handgun from a licensed dealer. 

Everytown’s research documents a genuine and deeply troubling problem, but identifying a disparity isn’t the same thing as explaining it. And without understanding what’s driving this violence, we’re unlikely to come up with effective ways to prevent it.

Are these shootings connected to ongoing beefs, gang activity, or other criminal behavior? Are the people involved known to law enforcement? How many have previous arrests or convictions? How many have been given plea deals that put them right back out on the street with little consequence for their crimes? 

How exactly would another background check requirement, a ban on so-called assault weapons, or restrictions on concealed carry have prevented what happened in Birmingham or Tallahassee? We’re talking about teenagers allegedly possessing handguns they couldn’t legally purchase in the first place. These aren’t law-abiding gun owners exploiting some ‘loophole” in the law. Adding another prohibition to the books isn’t much of a solution when the people pulling the triggers have already demonstrated their willingness to disregard the ones we’ve got.

There is, however, a strategy with a far better track record than simply passing more gun laws and hoping violent offenders suddenly decide to obey them. The premise of focused deterrence is simple: a relatively small number of individuals are responsible for a disproportionate share of serious violence. Police identify those individuals through evidence-based investigations, work with community leaders to communicate that further violence will bring swift and certain consequences, and offer services and assistance to those willing to walk away from criminal activity… while also delivering the swift and certain consequences for those who don’t change their ways. Instead of treating every gun owner as a potential criminal, focused deterrence concentrates attention on the people and groups most likely to commit violent acts.

Why not apply that same approach to HBCU homecomings and other major events? Local police departments could work with campus security, neighboring jurisdictions, prosecutors, and community organizations well before kickoff to identify ongoing violent disputes, communicate directly with individuals at elevated risk of involvement in violence, and intervene before those conflicts spill into crowded streets and parking lots. They could concentrate patrols and investigative resources in the places where violence is most likely to occur, particularly after the game when thousands of fans are leaving the stadium. 

None of this requires treating HBCU students or football fans as suspects, and none of it requires stripping anyone of their constitutional rights. It requires recognizing that the problem isn’t the thousands of people who came to enjoy a football game. It’s the handful of individuals willing to turn that celebration into a crime scene, and making sure they understand that violence will bring consequences long before anyone pulls a trigger.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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