Tennessee School Shooter Audrey Hale with her AR-15
A high school athletics department in a small town in central Ohio is raffling off powerful firearms—including an AR-15—to raise funds to buy equipment for the track team. The gun raffle, in aid of the Upper Sandusky Rams Track and Field, has been so popular that this week the organizers added a fifth gun to the prize list and on Wednesday announced all 500 $10 tickets have been sold.
The guns on offer include a Savage 93R17 bolt-action rifle with scope, a Mossberg Patriot 350 Legend, two Tisas 1911 handguns, and an AR-15 rifle. The raffle comes in the same week as a former student used an AR-15 style weapon along with two other guns during a mass shooting that left three children and three adults dead at Covenant School in Nashville on Monday.
The AR-15, dubbed “America’s Rifle” by the National Rifle Association in 2016, has been used in many of the highest-profile mass shootings over the last decade or so, including the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that claimed 27 lives; the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando that left 49 dead; the Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 that killed 58 people, and the Parkland school shooting in 2018 that claimed 17 lives.
“Our society is so diseased,” one Upper Sandusky resident wrote, while another added: “When I first saw this, I thought it was an April Fool’s joke. Nope, just good ole Upper Sandusky. Whatever happened to normal raffles, like sporting event tickets, gift cards to local establishments… Nope, an AR-15. Maybe it will make the kids run faster? So, so disturbing.”
