A week after the shooting at a Texas elementary school, in which twenty children and teachers died, a Florida secondary school concluded its annual raffle for rifles, pistols and hunting equipment on Wednesday.
Since last May 4, officials from the James Madison High School, in the city of Madison, in the north of the state, have raffled thirty firearms and various hunting material every day. “It’s all for the boys,” the director of the Florida center, Mark Akerman, said this Wednesday during the Facebook broadcast of the last draw, which, he explains, has once again been very “successful.”
The “grand prize” of the raffle, whose winner was revealed on Wednesday, was a Browning A5 Sweet 16 rapid-cycle shotgun, designed especially for bird hunting. But the center of this rural area of Florida has also raffled shotguns with telescopic sights, short pistols, ammunition, thermal binoculars, a fish finder or a modern crossbow.
There have been 30 days of raffles to which students, teachers and administrative staff of the center were invited. Each ballot had a cost of 100 dollars and the maximum limit was 600 tickets sold.
This draw was interrupted by the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers died on May 24. Akerman suspended the draws the following day “out of respect for these tragic events”, although they resumed days later.
However, the draw did not stop when on May 14 there was a shooting in the New York town of Buffalo, in which ten people died, most of them African Americans.
With a small hype handled by the deputy director of the school, Patrick White, responsible for drawing the tickets with the names of the winners, this Tuesday the raffles were resumed and the lucky ones who had taken the weapons and hunting items that were not could be raffled because of the shooting in Texas.
According to the raffle poster, the participants had to “comply with all regulations” federal and Florida, where for weapons that do not require a special license it is not even necessary to go through a background check.
White concluded the raffle by thanking the participants because this raffle had “helped the school, which really needs it.”
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