“My kids played travel baseball, too, but there is appropriate and inappropriate,” Hamlin told The Washington Post. “How can you ask kids to have active-shooter drills in school and after school ask them to sell raffle tickets to win weapons that you are trying to protect yourself against?”
Now, after days of people expressing disappointment and questioning the decision to move forward with the raffle, the team announced it was no longer raffling off the guns this weekend. In an email to The [Washington] Post, Kevin Yankovich, commissioner of the Hilliard Baseball Association, said that while “the raffle was completely legal and being run in a responsible manner,” the organization’s board of directors decided late Thursday that there were other ways for the youth team to raise money.
“I totally understood why they wanted to do a raffle, as it is an excellent way to raise money,” Yankovich said. “However, we felt the items being raffled didn’t reflect our baseball organization.”
– Susan Berger in A youth baseball team planned to raffle off three guns, including a semiautomatic rifle. A backlash changed that.
