The raffle of an AR-15 by a youth athletic organization in Mount Washington has ignited community concerns about the appropriateness of including a potentially lethal prize in a fundraiser meant to benefit school-aged kids.
The Washington Heights Athletic Association organizes baseball and soccer teams for youths ages 7 to 12, according to its website. The group advertised on Facebook and on its website a “2024 W.H.A.A. Memorial Day Super Ticket” raffle to support field renovations, with prizes including:
- $3,000 in cash
- A $1,500 purse gift card
- A “Custom AR 15 chambered in caliber of your choice” provided by Gunnys Gunz. The winner of the rifle has the option to accept $500 in cash instead.
The offerings — which were removed from the WHAA’s Facebook page and website after PublicSource inquired about them — struck Mount Washington resident Ken Gianella as poorly thought-through.
“I don’t think it’s an appropriate prize for a youth athletic association considering all of the high school slaughters across the nation,” said Gianella, who is the president of the Mike Creighton Memorial Fund, which donates to the WHAA. Kids killed in mass shootings, he said, “are never going to have a chance to play ball.”
Organizers of the WHAA did not immediately respond to PublicSource’s requests for comment, but defended their decision on Facebook.
“Why is it a bad look? Is it illegal to own an AR-15?” wrote Matt Smith, the WHAA’s president, in response to comments critical of the choice of prize. “I am not sure what makes it inappropriate. Some people find games of chance inappropriate. Some find gambling in general inappropriate. I appreciate the feedback but completely disagree.”
Citizen Police Review Board calls for review of co-response model, expanded crisis intervention services
Gun raffles neither illegal nor uncommon
There’s nothing illegal about raffling a rifle, according to Marc D. Daffner, an attorney who often handles gun law cases.
Handgun transfers must be processed through federally licensed firearms dealers, said Daffner, but that doesn’t apply to long guns like the AR-15.
“You can just do the whole thing in a private sale, meet a guy in a parking lot,” he said. He’d recommend that any gun transfer be run through the standard transfer process and documented, and some organizations may have a licensed dealer on hand at the time the prize is awarded, he said.
A rifle can be an attractive prize for a nonprofit, he said. “They make a ton of money. They sell a lot of tickets.”
“I don’t have any data to give this quantitative backing, but anecdotally I would tell you this is a pretty common thing,” mostly for volunteer fire departments and other first responder organizations, said Josh Fleitman, campaign director for Ceasefire PA, which organizes statewide to reduce gun violence. “I think this is the first time I’ve seen a youth sports organization doing it.”
Richard Garland, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health, said he supports the rights of responsible gun owners but added that offering an assault rifle as a fundraising prize “sends the wrong message” to the youths it intends to benefit.
“If they’re going to raffle off something, raffle off something positive,” Garland said. “Maybe books or a scholarship to a university.”
Garland, who works extensively in local anti-violence efforts, said the surging gun violence around the country calls for particular care and attention in how weapons are modeled by parents and youth leaders. “If we put an AR-15 in a raffle, we’re cosigning on some of the things going wrong in society.”
Lee Davis, a violence prevention consultant, said he regularly works with athletics clubs and other youth organizations around Allegheny County but has never encountered one touting an assault rifle as a raffle prize.
“It’s very, very irresponsible,” Davis said. “It says you’re either disconnected to the community and what’s going on in the city or that you just don’t care.”
Davis pointed to a spate of recent homicides in the South Side, not far from Mount Washington, as examples of the carnage wrought by firearms.
“Any type of gun nowadays is super dangerous,” he said. “Again, it’s a terrible message that opens the door to a whole lot of other bad situations.”
Updated: Pittsburgh neglected Fern Hollow Bridge warnings for years, federal investigation finds
The right ‘vibe’ for the area?
On the WHAA’s Facebook page, one commenter called the prize “pretty ignorant to the gun-fever-mass-murder epidemic! For kids community activity no less.”
Another, though, said that the mix of prizes made sense.
The purse would “draw women’s interest in the raffle,” wrote that commenter. “A rifle tends to draw men’s interests in the raffle.”
That commenter, who is not one of the people listed on the WHAA’s website as an organizational leader, added: “Decisions like this are discussed at the board meetings every month. I’d say 9/10 people would agree so going with the majority.”
The prize may be out of sync, though, with the neighborhood’s current “vibe,” said Michael Carlin. He is the executive director of the Mount Washington Community Development Corp., but was speaking in his individual capacity, noting that the CDC has no position on the raffle.
“If this was Clinton County or something like that, that would be one thing,” he said. “It just seems like the wrong vibe. But that’s their business.”
The CDC, which has no financial tie to the WHAA, is holding a wine-tasting fundraiser, he added. “Does that encourage alcoholism? I don’t know.”
The AR-15 is “a symbol and a weapon of war and a symbol of this era of mass shootings,” said Ceasefire’s Fleitman. “In Pittsburgh, it does have special resonance and pain because of the Tree of Life shooting” in 2018, during which Robert Bowers carried an AR-15 and three handguns and killed 11 worshippers in a Squirrel Hill synagogue. “But sadly, that trauma is national at this point around this particular visceral symbol of danger.”
Gianella said the Mike Creighton Memorial Fund, named for a Mount Washington lawyer who died from cancer in 2007 and funded through a golf outing, annually gives the WHAA $500 to cover registration fees for kids whose families can’t afford it. He said the fund may reconsider its donations going forward in light of the raffle prize.
“The WHAA is a good organization,”said Mary Kay Creighton-Senneway, sister to Mike Creighton, “that made a bad decision.”
Rich Lord is PublicSource’s managing editor, and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.
Jamie Wiggan is PublicSource’s deputy editor, and can be reached at jamie@publicsource.org.
