As athletes go, the inexperienced and least-skilled players can get more passionate about the game than the professionals. Outside the professional leagues, players across all sports are not held to a standard of maturity or integrity in their style of play. When money and mass fandom comes into play, players become idols and role models. Their actions in the game are taken quite seriously and criticized heavily. But like I said earlier, none of this exists in the lower-tier leagues of sport and definitively in soccer.
In South America, it is found that some lower-tier soccer leagues can become quite aggressive when referees don’t make the “right” calls. Physical assault and battery is actually common for referees in South American countries and guns have been pulled out on rare occasions. Among referees, guns are pulled out for actions of self-defense against angry players responding to a call. In one recent match in Argentina, it was a player that grabbed a gun. An angry player grabbed a gun from his gym bag after receiving an unfavorable call and proceeded to shoot the referee three times, killing him.
The first event, happening in Brazil, can be seen in the video below and shows a referee in an argument with the linesman while holding a handgun. The story was reported that the referee ordered to have one of the players to be sent off the pitch and that call was met with a harsh response by the players. The referee said he felt physically threatened so he ran to the locker room to grab a gun out of his gym bag. The referee returned to the field with gun in hand and quickly diffused the situation. One can speculate that the linesman is calming the other one down to not use the gun against the aggressive players. No one was hurt in this situation but maybe the most surprising event following the incident is that no disciplinary action was brought upon the referee. The league responded by supporting the referee and his decision to bring a gun onto the field as a form of self-defense. It was later discovered that the reason why the referee had the gun was that he was a member of the military police. The referee stated that it became his duty as a police officer to defuse the situation and use any means that was available to him.
Only two weeks ago in Argentina, a gun was pulled out by a player and actually used but not for self-defense. On February 18, 2016, after a player was red-carded, the player went to his gym bag on the field and got a gun. He then went and shot the referee three times. From what I can gather right now, the shooter has still not been caught.
The questions asked after dramatic events like these two, center around the questions if referees should be carrying weapons in matches with high levels of violence. I think they should.
This is crazy. I have heard of an alarming amount of violence toward referees but never coming from them. I think that the referees decision to bring a gun onto the pitch is uncalled for and overkill, controlling violence with the threat of more violence is not a good system. The referee had enough time to go back to the locker room and grab his gun and come back so it doesn’t seem like the situation was that out of hand. Furthermore, the league should not be supporting referees with guns. What would have happened if the situation continued to escalate, would the ref had shot at players? Would the league support him then? Do you think we will see an increase in gun wielding referees?