Welcome to Mississippi, Where High School Sports End in Autopsies

High school football is supposed to be one of the last safe communal rituals left in this country. Bands on the field, parents in lawn chairs, kids running around with face paint while concession workers hand out nachos in paper boats. Instead, in Mississippi this weekend, the soundtrack shifted from marching music to rapid gunfire. Three separate football-related events, all of them tied to a children’s game, ended in death.

The worst of it happened in Leland. The FBI claims the mass shooting that left sixteen people wounded began because of a disagreement between several individuals, as if wording it that way makes it any less catastrophic. Six of those injured never made it home. Authorities later identified them as adults barely out of childhood themselves and parents well into their forties, the youngest just eighteen. Four of them died where they fell, and two more later in the hospital. The shooting happened downtown after the homecoming game against Charleston, when students and their families were still milling around. No one has been arrested, yet state and federal officials have already defaulted to the standard script. Governor Tate Reeves announced that the state was praying for the victims. FBI officials also called for prayer. If thoughts and prayers were a solution, Mississippi wouldn’t be leading the nation in gun deaths.

In Heidelberg, people were still celebrating their win over Mize when gunfire cut through the noise. Two people died, one male and one female. The woman was pregnant. Another victim survived, though authorities have not released their condition. One body was found on the baseball field, the other near the bleachers, which makes it impossible to pretend this was some distant or isolated event. This happened in the middle of a school campus still packed with children. An eighteen-year-old named Tylar Jarod Goodloe is in custody as a person of interest, though investigators won’t say why.

In Rolling Fork, the shooting happened outside South Delta High School’s stadium. Deputies found a victim on the ground with two gunshot wounds who is expected to recover. Police later arrested two individuals, Justin Pam and Michael Miles Jr., after they were spotted driving away on Highway 61. They were caught because someone saw them leaving, not because Mississippi has meaningful gun regulations that stop people like them from ever firing a weapon in the first place.

It is absurd to keep pretending this is normal. Guns in Mississippi are easier to obtain than a driver’s license. An eighteen-year-old can openly carry a high-powered firearm without so much as a training course. There is no permit requirement for private sales, no waiting period for purchases, and no background check for most transfers. When young men show up at high school football games armed, it is not a failure of the system. It is the intended outcome of laws written to ensure it.

What makes this even more grotesque is the setting. These were not gang hideouts or drug corners or any of the tired clichés politicians like to invoke to distance themselves from responsibility. These shootings happened at places where children were actively playing games. Cheerleaders were still cooling down from halftime routines. Younger siblings were still running around playing tag. The bleachers were filled with parents who came to watch their kids do something joyful.

But once again, the state’s answer is prayer. Always prayer. Prayer from the governor. Prayer from federal officials. Prayer from local coroners. Prayer as a policy replacement. Prayer as the official state substitute for regulation. Prayer as a smokescreen for inaction.

Faith may bring comfort, but it does not stop bullets. It does not prevent pregnant women from dying in the bleachers. It does not bring back teenagers whose only mistake was standing in the wrong place after a football game.

If high school sports can no longer exist without paramedics on standby and federal agents begging the public for homemade footage to identify killers, then something fundamental is broken. Mississippi’s leaders are not confused about what that something is. They’re just unwilling to fix it.

(Sources)