research on school shootings in america

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An Examination of US School Mass Shootings, 2017–2022: Findings and Implications

Antonis katsiyannis.

1 Department of Education and Human Development, College of Education, Clemson University, 101 Gantt Circle, Room 407 C, Clemson, SC 29634 USA

Luke J. Rapa

2 Department of Education and Human Development, College of Education, Clemson University, 101 Gantt Circle, Room 409 F, Clemson, SC 29634 USA

Denise K. Whitford

3 Steven C. Beering Hall of Liberal Arts and Education, Purdue University, 100 N. University Street, BRNG 5154, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2098 USA

Samantha N. Scott

4 Department of Education and Human Development, College of Education, Clemson University, 101 Gantt Circle, Room G01A, Clemson, SC 29634 USA

Gun violence in the USA is a pressing social and public health issue. As rates of gun violence continue to rise, deaths resulting from such violence rise as well. School shootings, in particular, are at their highest recorded levels. In this study, we examined rates of intentional firearm deaths, mass shootings, and school mass shootings in the USA using data from the past 5 years, 2017–2022, to assess trends and reappraise prior examination of this issue.

Extant data regarding shooting deaths from 2017 through 2020 were obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the web-based injury statistics query and reporting system (WISQARS), and, for school shootings in particular (2017–2022), from Everytown Research & Policy.

The number of intentional firearm deaths and the crude death rates increased from 2017 to 2020 in all age categories; crude death rates rose from 4.47 in 2017 to 5.88 in 2020. School shootings made a sharp decline in 2020—understandably so, given the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent government or locally mandated school shutdowns—but rose again sharply in 2021.

Conclusions

Recent data suggest continued upward trends in school shootings, school mass shootings, and related deaths over the past 5 years. Notably, gun violence disproportionately affects boys, especially Black boys, with much higher gun deaths per capita for this group than for any other group of youth. Implications for policy and practice are provided.

On May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old man killed 19 students and two teachers and wounded 17 individuals at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, using an AR-15-style rifle. Outside the school, he fired shots for about 5 min before entering the school through an unlocked side door and locked himself inside two adjoining classrooms killing 19 students and two teachers. He was in the school for over an hour (78 min) before being shot dead by the US Border Patrol Tactical Unit, though police officers were on the school premises (Sandoval, 2022 ).

The Robb Elementary School mass shooting, the second deadliest school mass shooting in American history, is the latest calamity in a long list of tragedies occurring on public school campuses in the USA. Regrettably, these tragedies are both a reflection and an outgrowth of the broader reality of gun violence in this country. In 2021, gun violence claimed 45,027 lives (including 20,937 suicides), with 313 children aged 0–11 killed and 750 injured, along with 1247 youth aged 12–17 killed and 3385 injured (Gun Violence Archive, 2022a ). Mass shootings in the USA have steadily increased in recent years, rising from 269 in 2013 to 611 in 2020. Mass shootings are typically defined as incidents in which four or more people are killed (Katsiyannis et al., 2018a ). However, the Gun Violence Archive considers mass shootings to be incidents in which four or more people are injured (Gun Violence Archive, 2022b ). Regardless of these distinctions in definition, in 2020, there were 19,384 gun murders, representing a 34% increase from the year before, a 49% increase over a 5-year period, and a 75% increase over a 10-year period (Pew Research Center, 2022 ). Regarding school-based shootings, to date in 2022, there have been at least 95 incidents of gunfire on school premises, resulting in 40 deaths and 76 injuries (Everytown Research & Policy, 2022b ). Over the past few decades, school shootings in the USA have become relatively commonplace: there were more in 2021 than in any year since 1999, with the median age of perpetrators being 16 (Washington Post, 2022 ; see also, Katsiyannis et al., 2018a ). Additionally, analysis of Everytown’s Gunfire on School Grounds dataset and related studies point to several key observations to be considered in addressing this challenge. For example, 58% of perpetrators had a connection to the school, 70% were White males, 73 to 80% obtained guns from home or relatives or friends, and 100% exhibited warning signs or showed behavior that was of cause for concern; also, in 77% of school shootings, at least one person knew about the shooter’s plan before the shooting events occurred (Everytown Research & Policy, 2021a ).

The USA has had 57 times as many school shootings as all other major industrialized nations combined (Rowhani-Rahbar & Moe, 2019 ). Guns are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the USA, with children ages 5–14 being 21 times and adolescents and young adults ages 15–24 being 23 times more likely to be killed with guns compared to other high-income countries. Furthermore, Black children and teens are 14 times and Latinx children and teens are three times more likely than White children to die by guns (Everytown Research & Policy, 2021b ). Children exposed to violence, crime, and abuse face a host of adverse challenges, including abuse of drugs and alcohol, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, school failure, and involvement in criminal activity (Cabral et al., 2021 ; Everytown Research and Policy, 2022b ; Finkelhor et al., 2013 ).

Yet, despite gun violence being considered a pressing social and public health issue, federal legislation passed in 1996 has resulted in restricting funding for the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The law stated that no funding earmarked for injury prevention and control may be used to advocate or promote firearm control (Kellermann & Rivara, 2013 ). More recently, in June 2022, the US Supreme Court struck down legislation restricting gun possession and open carry rights (New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 2021 ), broadening gun rights and increasing the risk of gun violence in public spaces. Nonetheless, according to Everytown Research & Policy ( 2022a ), states with strong gun laws experience fewer deaths per capita. In the aggregate, states with weaker gun laws (i.e., laws that are more permissive) experience 20.0 gun deaths per 100,000 residents versus 7.4 per 100,000 in states with stronger laws. The association between gun law strength and per capita death is stark (see Table ​ Table1 1 ).

Gun law strength and gun law deaths per 100,000 residents

Accounting for the top eight and the bottom eight states in gun law strength, gun law strength and gun deaths per 100,000 are correlated at r  =  − 0.85. Stronger gun laws are thus meaningfully linked with fewer deaths per capita. Data obtained from Everytown Research & Policy ( 2022a )

Notwithstanding the publicity involving gun shootings in schools, particularly mass shootings, violence in schools has been steadily declining. For example, in 2020, students aged 12–18 experienced 285,400 victimizations at school and 380,900 victimizations away from school; an annual decrease of 60% for school victimizations (from 2019 to 2020) (Irwin et al., 2022 ). Similarly, youth arrests in general in 2019 were at their lowest level since at least 1980; between 2010 and 2019, the number of juvenile arrests fell by 58%. Yet, arrests for murder increased by 10% (Puzzanchera, 2021 ).

In response to school violence in general, and school shootings in particular, schools have increasingly relied on increased security measures, school resource officers (SROs), and zero tolerance policies (including exclusionary and aversive measures) in their attempts to curb violence and enhance school safety. In 2019–2020, public schools reported controlled access (97%), the use of security cameras (91%), and badges or picture IDs (77%) to promote safety. In addition, high schools (84%), middle schools (81%), and elementary schools (55%) reported the presence of SROs (Irwin et al., 2022 ). Research, however, has indicated that the presence of SROs has not resulted in a reduction of school shooting severity, despite their increased prevalence. Rather, the type of firearm utilized in school shootings has been closely associated with the number of deaths and injuries (Lemieux, 2014 ; Livingston et al., 2019 ), suggesting implications for reconsideration of the kinds of firearms to which individuals have access.

Zero tolerance policies, though originally intended to curtail gun violence in schools, have expanded to cover a host of incidents (e.g., threats, bullying). Notwithstanding these intentions, these policies are generally ineffective in preventing school violence, including school shootings (American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008 ; Losinski et al., 2014 ), and have exacerbated the prevalence of youths’ interactions with law enforcement in schools. From the 2015–2016 to the 2017–2018 school years, there was a 5% increase in school-related arrests and a 12% increase in referrals to law enforcement (U.S. Department of Education, 2021 ); in 2017–18, about 230,000 students were referred to law enforcement and over 50,000 were arrested (The Center for Public Integrity, 2021 ). Law enforcement referrals have been a persistent concern aiding the school-to-prison pipeline, often involving non-criminal offenses and disproportionally affecting students from non-White backgrounds as well as students with disabilities (Chan et al., 2021 ; The Center for Public Integrity, 2021 ).

The consequences of these policies are thus far-reaching, with not only legal ramifications, but social-emotional and academic ones as well. For example, in 2017–2018, students missed 11,205,797 school days due to out-of-school suspensions during that school year (U.S. Department of Education, 2021 ), there were 96,492 corporal punishment incidents, and 101,990 students were physically restrained, mechanically restrained, or secluded (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, 2020 ). Such exclusionary and punitive measures have long-lasting consequences for the involved students, including academic underachievement, dropout, delinquency, and post-traumatic stress (e.g., Cholewa et al., 2018 ). Moreover, these consequences disproportionally affect culturally and linguistically diverse students and students with disabilities (Skiba et al., 2014 ; U.S. General Accountability Office, 2018 ), often resulting in great societal costs (Rumberger & Losen, 2017 ).

In the USA, mass killings involving guns occur approximately every 2 weeks, while school shootings occur every 4 weeks (Towers et al., 2015 ). Given the apparent and continued rise in gun violence, mass shootings, and school mass shootings, we aimed in this paper to reexamine rates of intentional firearm deaths, mass shootings, and school mass shootings in the USA using data from the past 5 years, 2017–2022, reappraising our analyses given the time that had passed since our earlier examination of the issue (Katsiyannis et al., 2018a , b ).

As noted in Katsiyannis et al., ( 2018a , b ), gun violence, mass shootings, and school shootings have been a part of the American way of life for generations. Such shootings have grown exponentially in both frequency and mortality rate since the 1980s. Using the same criteria applied in our previous work (Katsiyannis et al., 2018a , b ), we evaluated the frequency of shootings, mass shootings, and school mass school shootings from January 2017 through mid-July 2022. Extant data regarding shooting deaths from 2017 through 2020 were obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, utilizing the web-based injury statistics query and reporting system (WISQARS), and for school shootings from 2017 to 2022 from Everytown Research & Policy ( https://everytownresearch.org ), an independent non-profit organization that researches and communicates with policymakers and the public about gun violence in the USA. Intentional firearm death data were classified by age, as outlined in Katsiyannis et al., ( 2018a , b ), and the crude rate was calculated by dividing the number of deaths times 100,000, by the total population for each individual category.

The number of intentional firearm deaths and the crude death rates increased from 2017 to 2020 in all age categories. In absolute terms, the number of deaths rose from 14,496 in 2017 to 19,308 in 2020. In accord with this rise in the absolute number of deaths, crude death rates rose from 4.47 in 2017 to 5.88 in 2020. Table ​ Table2 2 provides the crude death rate in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, the most current years with data available. Figure  1 provides the raw number of deaths across the same time period.

Intentional firearm deaths across the USA (2017–2020)

Data obtained from WISQARS (2022)

Intentional firearm deaths across the USA (2017–2020). Note. Data obtained from WISQARS (2022)

As expected, in 2020, the number of fatal firearm injuries increased sharply from age 0–11 years, roughly elementary school age, to age 12–18 years, roughly middle school and high school age. Table ​ Table3 3 provides the crude death rates of children in 2020 who die from firearms. Males outnumbered females in every category of firearm deaths, including homicide, police violence, suicide, and accidental shootings, as well as for undetermined reasons for firearm discharge. Black males drastically surpassed all other children in the number of firearm deaths (2.91 per 100,000 0–11-year-olds; 57.10 per 100,000 12–18-year-olds). Also, notable is the high number of Black children 12–18 years killed by guns (32.37 per 100,000), followed by American Indian and Alaska Native children (18.87 per 100,000), in comparison to White children (12.40 per 100,000 children), Hispanic/Latinx children (8.16 per 100,000), and Asian and Pacific Islander children (2.95 per 100,000). A disproportionate number of gun deaths were also seen for Black girls relative to other girls (1.52 per 100,000 0–11-year-olds; 7.01 per 100,000 12–18-year-olds).

Fatal firearm injuries for children age 0–18 across the USA in 2020

  AN Alaska Native; – indicates 20 or fewer cases

Mass shootings and mass shooting deaths increased from 2017 to 2019, decreased in 2020, and then increased again in 2021. School shootings made a sharp decline in 2020—understandably so, given the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent government or locally mandated school shutdowns—but rose again sharply in 2021. Current rates reveal a continued increase, with numbers at the beginning of 2022 already exceeding those of 2017. School mass shooting counts were relatively low between 2017 through 2022, with four total during that time frame. Figure  2 provides raw numbers for mass shootings, school shootings, and school mass shootings from 2017 through 2022. Importantly, figures from the recent Uvalde, TX, school mass shooting at Robb Elementary School had not yet been recorded in the relevant databases at the time of this writing. With those deaths accounted for, 2022 is already the deadliest year for school mass shootings in the past 5 years.

Mass shootings, school shootings, and mass school shootings across the USA (2017–2022). Note. Data obtained from Everytown Research and Policy. Overlap present between all three categories

Gun violence in the USA, particularly mass shootings on the grounds of public schools, continues to be a pressing social and public health issue. Recent data suggest continued upward trends in school shootings, school mass shootings, and related deaths over the past 5 years—patterns that disturbingly mirror general gun violence and intentional shooting deaths in the USA across the same time period. The impacts on our nation’s youth are profound. Notably, gun violence disproportionately affects boys, especially Black boys, with much higher gun deaths per capita for this group than for any other group of youth. Likewise, Black girls are disproportionately affected compared to girls from other ethnic/racial groups. Moreover, while the COVID-19 pandemic and school shutdowns tempered gun violence in schools at least somewhat during the 2020 school year—including school shootings and school mass shootings—trend data show that gun violence rates are still continuing to rise. Indeed, gun violence deaths resulting from school shootings are at their highest recorded levels ever (Irwin et al., 2022 ).

Implications for Schools: Curbing School Violence

In recent years, the implementation of Multi-Tier Systems and Supports (MTSS), including Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and Response to Intervention (RTI), has resulted in improved school climate and student engagement as well as improved academic and behavioral outcomes (Elrod et al., 2022 ; Santiago-Rosario et al., 2022 ; National Center for Learning Disabilities, n.d.). Such approaches have implications for reducing school violence as well. PBIS uses a tiered framework intended to improve student behavioral and academic outcomes; it creates positive learning environments through the implementation of evidence-based instructional and behavioral interventions, guided by data-based decision-making and allocation of students across three tiers. In Tier 1, schools provide universal supports to all students in a proactive manner; in Tier 2, supports are aimed to students who need additional academic, behavioral, or social-emotional intervention; and in Tier 3, supports are provided in an intensive and individualized manner (Lewis et al., 2010 ). The implementation of PBIS has resulted in an improved school climate, fewer office referrals, and reductions in out-of-school suspensions (Bradshaw et al., 2010 ; Elrod et al.,  2010 , 2022 ; Gage et al., 2018a , 2018b ; Horner et al., 2010 ; Noltemeyer et al., 2019 ). Likewise, RTI aims to improve instructional outcomes through high-quality instruction and universal screening for students to identify learning challenges and similarly allocates students across three tiers. In Tier 1, schools implement high-quality classroom instruction, screening, and group interventions; in Tier 2, schools implement targeted interventions; and in Tier 3, schools implement intensive interventions and comprehensive evaluation (National Center for Learning Disabilities, n.d ). RTI implementation has resulted in improved academic outcomes (e.g., reading, writing) (Arrimada et al., 2022 ; Balu et al., 2015 ; Siegel, 2020 ) and enhanced school climate and student behavior.

In order to support students’ well-being, enhance school climate, and support reductions in behavioral issues and school violence, schools should consider the implementation of MTSS, reducing reliance on exclusionary and aversive measures such as zero tolerance policies, seclusion and restraints, corporal punishment, or school-based law enforcement referrals and arrests (see Gage et al., in press ). Such approaches and policies are less effective than the use of MTSS, exacerbate inequities and enhance disproportionality (particularly for youth of color and students with disabilities), and have not been shown to reduce violence in schools.

Implications for Students: Ensuring Physical Safety and Supporting Mental Health

Students should not have to attend school and fear becoming victims of violence in general, no less gun violence in particular. Schools must ensure the physical safety of their students. Yet, as the substantial number of school shootings continues to rise in the USA, so too does concern about the adverse impacts of violence and gun violence on students’ mental health and well-being. Students are frequently exposed to unavoidable and frightening images and stories of school violence (Child Development Institute, n.d. ) and are subject to active shooter drills that may not actually be effective and, in some cases, may actually induce trauma (Jetelina, 2022 ; National Association of School Psychologists & National Association of School Resources Officers, 2021 ; Wang et al., 2020 ). In turn, students struggle to process and understand why these events happen and, more importantly, how they can be prevented (National Association of School Psychologists, 2015 ). School personnel should be prepared to support the mental health needs of students, both in light of the prevalence of school gun violence and in the aftermath of school mass shootings.

Research provides evidence that traumatic events, such as school mass shootings, can and do have mental health consequences for victims and members of affected communities, leading to an increase in post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression, and other psychological systems (Lowe & Galea, 2017 ). At the same time, high media attention to such events indirectly exposes and heightens feelings of fear, anxiety, and vulnerability in students—even if they did not attend the school where the shooting occurred (Schonfeld & Demaria, 2020 ). Students of all ages may experience adjustment difficulties and engage in avoidance behaviors (Schonfeld & Demaria, 2020 ). As a result, school personnel may underestimate a student’s distress after a shooting and overestimate their resilience. In addition, an adult’s difficulty adjusting in the wake of trauma may also threaten a student’s sense of well-being because they may believe their teachers cannot provide them with the protection they need to remain safe in school (Schonfeld & Demaria, 2020 ).

These traumatic events have resounding consequences for youth development and well-being. However, schools continue to struggle to meet the demands of student mental health needs as they lack adequate funding for resources, student support services, and staff to provide the level of support needed for many students (Katsiyannis et al., 2018a ). Despite these limiting factors, children and youth continue to look to adults for information and guidance on how to react to adverse events. An effective response can significantly decrease the likelihood of further trauma; therefore, all school personnel must be prepared to talk with students about their fears, to help them feel safe and establish a sense of normalcy and security in the wake of tragedy (National Association of School Psychologists, 2016 ). Research suggests a number of strategies can be utilized by educators, school leaders, counselors, and other mental health professionals to support the students and staff they serve.

Recommendations for Educators

The National Association of School Psychologists ( 2016 ) recommends the following practices for educators to follow in response to school mass shootings. Although a complex topic to address, the issue needs to be acknowledged. In particular, educators should designate time to talk with their students about the event, and should reassure students that they are safe while validating their fears, feelings, and concerns. Recognizing and stressing to students that all feelings are okay when a tragedy occurs is essential. It is important to note that some students do not wish to express their emotions verbally. Other developmentally appropriate outlets, such as drawing, writing, reading books, and imaginative play, can be utilized. Educators should also provide developmentally appropriate explanations of the issue and events throughout their conversations. At the elementary level, students need brief, simple answers that are balanced with reassurances that schools are safe and that adults are there to protect them. In the secondary grades, students may be more vocal in asking questions about whether they are truly safe and what protocols are in place to protect them at school. To address these questions, educators can provide information related to the efforts of school and community leaders to ensure school safety. Educators should also review safety procedures and help students to identify at least one adult in the building to whom they can go if they feel threatened or at risk. Limiting exposure to media and social media is also important, as developmentally inappropriate information can cause anxiety or confusion. Educators should also maintain a normal routine by keeping a regular school schedule.

Recommendations for School Leaders

Superintendents, principals, and other school administrative personnel are looked upon to provide leadership and comfort to staff, students, and parents during a tragedy. Reassurance can be provided by reiterating safety measures and student supports that are in place in their district and school (The National Association of School Psychologists, 2015 ). The NASP recommends the following practices for school leaders regarding addressing student mental health needs directly. First, school leaders should be a visible, welcoming presence by greeting students and visiting classrooms. School leaders should also communicate with the school community, including parents and students, about their efforts to maintain safe and caring schools through clear behavioral expectations, positive behavior interventions and supports, and crisis planning preparedness. This can include the development of press releases for broad dissemination within the school community. School leaders should also provide crisis training and professional development for staff, based upon assessments of needs and targeted toward identified knowledge or skill gaps. They should also ensure the implementation of violence prevention programs and curricula in school and review school safety policies and procedures to ensure that all safety issues are adequately covered in current school crisis plans and emergency response procedures.

Recommendations for Counselors and Mental Health Professionals

School counselors offer critical assistance to their buildings’ populations as they experience crises or respond to emergencies (American School Counselor Association, 2019 ; Brown, 2020 ). Two models that stand out in the literature utilized by counselors in the wake of violent events are the Preparation, Action, Recovery (PAR) model and the Prevent and prepare; Reaffirm; Evaluate; provide interventions and Respond (PREPaRE) model. PREPaRE is the only comprehensive, nationally available training curriculum created by educators for educators (The National Association of School Psychologists, n.d. ). Although beneficial, neither the PAR nor PREPaRE model directly addresses school counselors’ responses to school shootings when their school is directly affected (Brown, 2020 ). This led to the development of the School Counselor’s Response to School Shootings-Framework of Recommendations (SCRSS-FR) model, which includes six stages, each of which has corresponding components for school counselors who have lived through a school mass shooting. Each of these models provides the necessary training to school-employed mental health professionals on how to best fill the roles and responsibilities generated by their membership on school crisis response teams (The National Association of School Psychologists, n.d. ).

Other Implications: Federal and State Policy

Recent events at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, prompted the US Congress to pass landmark legislation intended to curb gun violence, enhancing background checks for prospective gun buyers who are under 21 years of age as well as allowing examination of juvenile records beginning at age 16, including health records related to prospective gun buyers’ mental health. Additionally, this legislation provides funding that will allow states to implement “red flag laws” and other intervention programs while also strengthening laws related to the purchase and trafficking of guns (Cochrane, 2022 ). Yet, additional legislation reducing or eliminating access to assault rifles and other guns with large capacity magazines, weapons that might easily be deemed “weapons of mass destruction,” is still needed (Interdisciplinary Group on Preventing School & Community Violence, 2022 ; see also Flannery et al., 2021 ). In 2019, the US Congress started to appropriate research funding to support research on gun violence, with $25 million in equal shares provided on an annual basis from both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health (Roubein, 2022 ; Wan, 2019 ). Additional research is, of course, still needed.

Despite legislative progress, and while advancements in gun legislation are meaningful and have the potential to aid in the reduction of gun violence in the USA, school shootings and school mass shootings are something schools and students will contend with in the months and years ahead. This reality has serious implications for schools and for students, points that need serious consideration. Therefore, it is imperative that gun violence is framed as a pressing national public health issue deserving attention, with drastic steps needed to curb access to assault rifles and guns with high-capacity magazines, based on extensive and targeted research. As noted, Congress, after many years of inaction, has started to appropriate funds to address this issue. However, the level of funding is still minimal in light of the pressing challenge that gun violence presents. Furthermore, the messaging of conservative media, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and republican legislators framing access to all and any weapons—including assault rifles—as a constitutional right under the second amendment bears scrutiny. Indeed, the second amendment denotes that “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Security of the nation is arguably the intent of the amendment, an intent that is clearly violated as evidenced in the ever-increasing death toll associated with gun violence in the USA.

Whereas federal legislation would be preferable, the possibility of banning assault weapons is remote (in light of recent Congressional action). Similarly, state action has been severely curtailed in light of the US Supreme Court’s decision regarding New York state law. However, data on gun fatalities and injuries, the correspondence of gun violence to laws regulating access across the world and states, and failed security measures such as armed guards posted in schools (e.g., Robb Elementary School) must be consistently emphasized. Additionally, the widespread sense of immunity for gun manufacturers should be tested in the same manner that tobacco manufacturers and opioid pharmaceuticals have been. The success against such tobacco and opioid manufacturers, once unthinkable, is a powerful precedent to consider for how the threat of gun violence against public health might be addressed.

Author Contribution

AK conceived of and designed the study and led the writing of the manuscript. LJR collaborated on the study design, contributed to the writing of the study, and contributed to the editing of the final manuscript. DKW analyzed the data and wrote up the results. SNS contributed to the writing of the study.

Declarations

The authors declare no competing interests.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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US School Shootings, 1997–1998 Through 2021–2022

Us school mass shootings, 1997–1998 through 2021–2022, us school mass shootings, 1997–1998 through 2021–2022: fatalities and injuries, conclusions, school shootings in the united states: 1997–2022.

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Luke J. Rapa , Antonis Katsiyannis , Samantha N. Scott , Olivia Durham; School Shootings in the United States: 1997–2022. Pediatrics April 2024; 153 (4): e2023064311. 10.1542/peds.2023-064311

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Video Abstract

Gun violence in the United States is a public health crisis. In 2019, gun injury became the leading cause of death among children aged birth to 19 years. Moreover, the United States has had 57 times as many school shootings as all other major industrialized nations combined. The purpose of this study was to understand the frequency of school-related gun violence across a quarter century, considering both school shootings and school mass shootings.

We drew on 2 publicly available datasets whose data allowed us to tabulate the frequency of school shootings and school mass shootings. The databases contain complementary data that provide a longitudinal, comprehensive view of school-related gun violence over the past quarter century.

Across the 1997–1998 to 2021–2022 school years, there were 1453 school shootings. The most recent 5 school years reflected a substantially higher number of school shootings than the prior 20 years. In contrast, US school mass shootings have not increased, although school mass shootings have become more deadly.

School shootings have risen in frequency in the recent 25 years and are now at their highest recorded levels. School mass shootings, although not necessarily increasing in frequency, have become more deadly. This leads to detrimental outcomes for all the nation’s youth, not just those who experience school-related gun violence firsthand. School-based interventions can be used to address this public health crisis, and effective approaches such as Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports and services should be used in support of students’ mental health and academic and behavioral needs.

Gun violence in the United States is a public health crisis. In 2019, gun injury became the leading cause of death among children aged birth-19 years. Similarly, school-related gun violence (eg, school shootings) has recently reached peak levels.

This study provides a longitudinal, comprehensive view of school-related gun violence over the past quarter century. Results reveal acceleration in school shootings in recent years, but not in school mass shootings; however, school mass shootings have become more deadly.

Gun violence in the United States is a public health crisis, with severe consequences for the nation’s youth. In 2019, gun injury became the leading cause of death among children aged birth to 19 years, surpassing vehicle-related deaths for the first time. 1   In 2020, the United States was the only country among its higher-income peers in which guns were the leading cause of death among children and adolescents. 2 , 3   In the 2021–2022 school year, the average number of gunfire incidents on school grounds had virtually quadrupled over the prior year, reaching an all-time high. 4   Likewise, during that same year, there were a total of 93 school shootings with casualties in elementary and secondary schools—more than in any other year since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began collecting such data. 5   In all, the United States has had 57 times as many school shootings as all other major industrialized nations combined. 6  

In addition to these dire statistics, gun purchases have recently reached an all-time high in the United States, with more than 22 million guns procured in 2022. 7   Stronger gun laws are linked with fewer deaths per capita, and recent empirical evidence suggests that states that instantiate more restrictive gun regulations have reduced gun deaths. 8   – 10   For example, child access protection legislation in 29 states and Washington, D.C., has resulted in a 22% decrease in firearm injuries per capita in those jurisdictions; notwithstanding, strong child access protection legislation has seen a 41% decrease in recent years. 11  

Sadly, children’s exposure to gun violence in the United States, including gun violence associated with school shootings, has become commonplace over the past quarter century. The Columbine High School massacre that occurred in April 1999 heightened American discourse—and remains symbolically at the forefront of the American psyche—about school-related gun violence. Since that time, gun violence has come to typify schooling experiences of the nation’s youth. As such, the issue of gun violence in the United States, including school-related gun violence, demands continued attention, especially in terms of its effects on youth. Consequently, the purpose of this study was to assess school-related gun violence over the recent past 25-year period, starting approximately with the Columbine High School massacre. Specifically, we set out to examine school-related gun violence vis-à-vis kindergarten through grade 12 school shootings and school mass shootings across a recent 25-year period, 1997–1998 through 2021–2022. Our primary aim was to understand the frequency of school-related gun violence across the quarter century, from the 1997–1998 school year through the 2021–2022 school year, considering both school shootings and school mass shootings.

To accomplish the aim of our study, we drew on 2 publicly available datasets whose data would allow us to tabulate the frequency of school shootings and school mass shootings from the 1997–1998 school year through the 2021–2022 school year. The databases were selected because they contain complementary data that, when taken together, would provide a longitudinal, comprehensive view of school shootings and school mass shootings in the United States over the past quarter century. Data on school shootings were retrieved from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security’s School Shooting Safety Compendium. 12   Data on school mass shootings were retrieved from the US Mass Shootings, 1982–2023 database, developed by Mother Jones . 13   Two noteworthy challenges that exist when studying school shootings and school mass shootings are the lack of a central or unified database that contains all incidents of gun violence in the United States, and the varied definitions used, within disparate databases, for what constitutes respective datapoints—for example, what counts as a school shooting or a school mass shooting. 14   For the purposes of this study, we followed the definitions provided in each respective database for the outcome of interest. As such, in our study, a “school shooting” constituted “each and every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week”; incidents are cataloged in the database when they are noted in news reports published in print or online, and all specified incidents were included in our study. 12   Similarly, in our study, a “school mass shooting” was a shooting noted to have occurred at a kindergarten through 12th grade school site during which 3 or more victims were killed (shootings that occurred before January 2013 were counted if 4 or more victims were killed, pursuant to the operational definition of “mass shooting” that was in place at the time the database was initiated). 13   Again, all specified incidents in the database were included in our study. The analyses we conducted drew on incidents logged in each respective database in accord with these definitions. Data presented are holistic, as tabulated from each respective data source and calculated for each school year (which we denoted as July 1 through June 30). Results are presented descriptively.

Across the 1997–1998 to 2021–2022 school years, there were 1453 school shootings. The number of school shootings in the United States within a given school year has increased noticeably over the past 25 years, with the number of incidents per year initially appearing to be somewhat steady, then declining slightly, but then rising sharply in more recent years ( Fig 1 ). The number of school shootings in a given school year numbered between 15 and 328, with a low of 15 occurring during the 2009–2010 school year and a high of 328 occurring during the 2021–2022 school year. The most recent 5 school years reflected a substantially higher number of school shootings than the previous 20 years. Over the latest 5 school years—that is, across the 2017–2018 to the 2021–2022 school years—there were 794 school shootings. That was 135 more than the number of school shootings that occurred across the previous 15 school years combined ( n = 659).

US school shootings by school year, 1997–1998 through 2021–2022. School year denoted as July 1–June 30. Source: CHDS School Shooting Safety Compendium. Per the definition provided in the Compendium, a school shooting is defined as brandishing a gun, firing a gun, or a bullet hitting school property for any reason.

Although the number of US school shootings has substantially increased in recent years ( Fig 1 ), US school mass shootings have not increased in parallel ( Fig 2 ). There was a total of 11 school mass shootings across the 1997–1998 to 2021–2022 school years. A school mass shooting occurred in 8 of the 25 school year periods examined, with 2 school mass shootings occurring in 3 of the last 25 school year periods examined. There were 17 school years when no mass shooting occurred, whereas no more than 2 school mass shootings occurred during a given school year.

US school mass shootings by school year, 1997–1998 through 2021–2022. School year denoted as July 1–June 30. School mass shootings tabulated here are included in the school shooting counts reported in Fig 1 . Source: Mother Jones. 13  

Across the 1997–1998 to 2021–2022 school years, a total of 122 people were killed and 126 were injured in the 11 school mass shootings that occurred, for a total of 248 victims ( Fig 3 ). On average then, over the 25-year time span examined, there were approximately 5 fatalities and 5 injuries per school year that could be attributed to school mass shootings. The greatest number of fatalities and injuries sustained from school mass shootings, combined, was in the 2017–2018 school year, with 27 fatalities and 30 injuries. The 2021–2022 school year had the second greatest number of fatalities and injuries sustained from school mass shootings, combined, with 25 fatalities and 24 injuries. The most recent 10 years had more fatalities and injuries ( n = 141) than the previous 15 years ( n = 107), with 34 more victims overall. As such, although the number of school mass shootings did not dramatically increase over the 25-year period spanning the 1997–1998 to 2021–2022 school years—in contrast to the number of school shootings more generally—school mass shootings became more deadly. For example, there were 7.6 fatalities per school mass shooting event ( n = 5) from 1997–1998 to 2011–2012, compared with 14 fatalities per school mass shooting event ( n = 6) from 2012–2013 to 2021–2022. Thus, the number of deaths per mass shooting event has effectually almost doubled when comparing the most recent school mass shooting events with those that occurred earlier.

US school mass shootings by school year: number of fatalities and number injured, 1997–1998 through 2021–2022. School year denoted as July 1–June 30. Source: Mother Jones. 13  

Rates of gun violence in the United States continue to rise and, as a consequence, so do deaths resulting from that gun violence. 9 , 15   School shootings on the premises of U.S. kindergarten through twelfth grade schools are at their highest recorded levels. School-related gun violence and school mass shootings continue to be a serious public health concern, uniquely affecting youth within the United States. 16   In the discussion that follows, we draw on our findings and connect them to recent scholarship to consider the implications of increased school-related gun violence, including the psychological trauma that coincides with the rising prevalence of school shootings and the increased deadliness of school mass shootings in the United States.

The prevalence of school shootings and school mass shootings induces trauma in school-aged youth. Coping with the aftermath of violence—including school shootings and school mass shootings—is stressful and exacerbates that trauma. Children and adolescents directly exposed to violence and crime face a host of ancillary challenges, including drug and alcohol use and abuse, depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, school failure, and involvement in criminal activity. 4 , 17   – 19   Moreover, youth indirectly exposed are peripherally impacted through extensive media coverage of school shootings and school mass shootings; this leads to more people suffering the effects of these tragedies, with resultant outcomes tied to worsened mental health consequences among members of communities in which gun violence occurs. 18 , 20  

Traumatic events—proximal or distal—affect youth’s development and well-being. Yet, schools often lack the financing for resources, student support programs, and personnel to provide students with optimal care. That is, schools sometimes struggle to meet the demands of students’ mental health needs even as the prevalence of school shootings increases and as the consequences of school mass shootings become more dire. 21   Successful school-based interventions and responses are possible, and they can lessen the probability of further trauma among youth impacted by gun violence. 22   Such interventions are needed in addition to broader policy changes and further restrictions in access to firearms. 16  

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, President Obama promised to fund hundreds more school resource officers (SROs) and school-based mental health specialists across the nation. 23   In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, more than 450 bills were introduced in state or federal legislatures with a focus on school safety. 9 , 24 , 25   To reduce violence and improve school safety, schools have relied increasingly on heightened security measures, including increased numbers of SROs and the implementation of zero-tolerance policies (including exclusionary and aversive measures). Despite their prevalence, however, research suggests that the presence of SROs has not decreased school shootings. 26 , 27   Similarly, though initially designed to reduce gun violence in schools, zero-tolerance policies have been broadened to cover a variety of incidents (eg, threats, bullying). Despite best intentions, these policies have generally failed to stop school shootings and other forms of violence. 28 , 29   Instead, such policies have increased the number of times students interact with law enforcement in and around schools.

Along with armed security, schools throughout the nation are teaching their students how to “run, hide, or fight” if approached by an active shooter. 16   During Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate drills, students are frequently exposed to unavoidable and frightening images and stories of school violence. 30   They are subject to active shooter drills that may not be effective and, in some cases, may themselves actually induce trauma. Simulation drills expose students to aggressive and frightening elements—for example, the use of fake blood, the shooting of guns loaded with blanks or rubber pellets, and the false pretense that it the occurrence is not a drill but an actual attack. 16 , 31   Despite the potential for induced fear, anxiety, and trauma to come from these drills, school administrators view these activities as a suitable response to parental demands to keep children safe. 16 , 32   Whatever benefit physical security, active shooter drills, and SROs may have in safeguarding students, imposing fortress-like settings on youth can increase fear and introduce trauma rather than reduce it. 16 , 33 , 34   In effect, the supports designed to keep students safe may be inadvertently doing harm to their mental health. To enhance efforts to support student safety, district and school leaders must aspire to implement discrete security measures to prevent gun violence and school shootings, for example, through environmental design. 16 , 35 , 36  

Although security measures surely play an important role in protecting students from gun violence, it may be insufficient to focus only on shooting prevention through “hardening the target” 16   —that is by making school sites more secure to preemptively mitigate disaster. Prevention starts long before a shooter enters a school, and it includes more than just security measures on school premises. Instead, a comprehensive and scientifically supported public health approach is needed to address gun violence and school shootings. The Coalition of National Researchers proposed such an approach for safeguarding both children and adults against gun violence; the approach involves 3 levels of prevention: (1) universal approaches promoting safety and well-being for everyone; (2) practices for reducing risk and promoting protective factors for persons experiencing difficulties; and (3) interventions for individuals where violence is present or appears imminent. 37  

Recently, the framework of Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports (MTSS)—including Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports and Response to Intervention—has been implemented in schools. 9 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41   This evidence-based framework enables school personnel to address students’ educational, social, emotional, and behavioral needs. The Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports offers a wealth of resources and implementation strategies, and also provides information about data-driven decision-making, integration of evidence-based behavioral and academic interventions, preventive measures, culturally sensitive practices, and mental health support. 41 , 42   Schools should consider the implementation of MTSS as a means to counter the threat of gun violence, school shootings, and school mass shootings because it reduces reliance on exclusionary and aversive measures like zero-tolerance policies, seclusion and restraints, corporal punishment, and school-based law enforcement referrals and arrests. Instead, MTSS engenders support for students’ well-being, improves school climate, and supports reductions in behavioral issues and school violence. 9 , 43  

This study, like any empirical inquiry, has some limitations that should be considered as its results are interpreted. First, the databases used for this study were compiled directly from news reports and other publicly available or publicly reported information. Although the authors of each respective database have endeavored to do their due diligence to verify the accuracy of the data compiled in their database, because of reliance on public reporting, there is certainly the potential for undercounting the number of school-related gun violence incidents that occurred each year. As media attention on gun violence has increased over the years, there is also the potential for the number of reported incidents each year to be higher, such that incidents overall may not have increased or be increasing, but rather the observed increases may be an artifact of more attention paid to this issue by news media in more recent years. Given the similar national trends in gun violence and gun-related deaths, however, this explanation seems unlikely. 15 , 44  

The analyses in this study were also limited by and linked to the definitions of school shootings and school mass shootings as delineated in the databases from which we drew for the study’s data. This naturally constrained our ability to consider these outcomes from vantage points that are either beyond the scope or different in scope from those advanced by and reported in each respective database. 14   There is no singular national database that contains all pertinent information and complete statistics on school shootings and school mass shootings. This limits researchers’ ability to conduct empirical analyses on school shootings and school mass shootings.

These limitations notwithstanding, the analyses we conducted did provide new insights into the issue of school shootings and school mass shootings across a recent 25-year span, school years 1997–1998 through 2021–2022. Rates of school shootings have increased, and school mass shootings have become more deadly. In light of these results, we considered the effects of these increasing rates and risks associated with school-related gun violence for the nation’s youth, who have spent their entire lives attending schools marked by the specter of school shootings and school mass shootings.

Gun violence in United States is a public health crisis affecting the nation’s youth. School shootings have risen in frequency in the recent 25 years, and they are now at their highest recorded levels. School mass shootings, while they have not necessarily increased in frequency, have become more deadly. This public health crisis leads to detrimental outcomes for all the nation’s youth—not just those who experience school-related gun violence firsthand. School-based interventions can be used to address this public health crisis, and effective approaches such as MTSS and services should be used in support of students’ mental health and academic and behavioral needs.

Drs Rapa and Katsiyannis conceptualized and designed the study, contributed to analyses, drafted portions of the initial manuscript, and critically reviewed and revised the manuscript; Ms Scott and Ms Durham drafted portions of the initial manuscript and critically reviewed and revised the manuscript; and all authors approved the final manuscript as submitted and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

COMPANION PAPER: A companion to this article can be found online at www.pediatrics.org/cgi/doi/10.1542/peds.2023-065281 .

FUNDING: No external funding.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST DISCLOSURES: The authors have indicated they have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.

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The latest government data on school shootings

The 2021–22 school year had the highest number of school shootings since records began in 2000.

Updated on Tue, February 20, 2024 by the USAFacts Team

In the wake of the school shooting at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa, USAFacts has collected recent data about school shootings in the United States. Here’s what current data has to say about these incidents.

The Center for Homeland Defense and Security maintains a collection of metrics on school shootings: the K–12 School Shooting Database (or K–12 SSDB) .

How many people have died in school shootings?

From the 2000–01 to 2021–22 school years, there were 1,375 school shootings at public and private elementary and secondary schools, resulting in 515 deaths and 1,161 injuries.

School shootings, defined

The definition of a school shooting is provided by the School Shooting Safety Compendium (SSSC) from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. The SSSC defines “school shootings” as incidents in which “a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week.” During the coronavirus pandemic, this definition included shootings that happened on school property during remote instruction.

The highest number of school shootings and casualties occurred during the 2021–22 school year, with 327 incidences resulting in 81 deaths and 269 injuries.

Between the 2000–01 and the 2021–22 school years, 70.8% of the 1,375 school shootings resulted in deaths or injuries.

Approximately 61.0% of recorded school shootings occurred at high schools, followed by 23.6% at elementary schools, 12.0% at middle or junior high schools, and 3.4% at other educational institutions. [1] School shootings at college-level institutions are not included in this dataset.

Where do school shootings occur most often? 

The most common spot for a school shooting was the parking lot, accounting for 28.3% of recorded cases, followed by any area directly outside the front or side entrances of the school (20.4%), and then “elsewhere inside of the school building,” meaning any area outside from the classroom, hallways, or basketball court (12.5%).

Where does this data come from?

The K-12 SSDB aims to compile information on school shootings from publicly available sources into a single comprehensive database. It defines school shootings as situations when someone brandishes or fires a gun on school property or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time or day of the week, or motivation.

For a fuller picture of crime in the US , read about how many high schoolers in the US carry guns , and get more USAFacts data in your inbox by subscribing to our weekly newsletter .

Includes schools for which school-level information was unknown or unspecified as well as those whose school level was "other."

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School shootings: What we know about them, and what we can do to prevent them

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, robin m. kowalski, ph.d. robin m. kowalski, ph.d. professor, department of psychology - clemson university @cuprof.

January 26, 2022

On the morning of Nov. 30, 2021, a 15-year-old fatally shot four students and injured seven others at his high school in Oakland County, Michigan. It’s just one of the latest tragedies in a long line of the horrific K-12 school shootings now seared into our memories as Americans.

And we have seen that the threat of school shootings, in itself, is enough to severely disrupt schools. In December, a TikTok challenge known as “ National Shoot Up Your School Day ” gained prominence. Although vague and with no clear origin, the challenge warned of possible acts of violence at K-12 schools. In response, some schools nationwide cancelled classes, others stepped up security. Many students stayed home from school that day. (It’s worth noting that no incidents of mass violence ended up occurring.)

What are the problems that appear to underlie school shootings? How can we better respond to students that are in need? If a student does pose a threat and has the means to carry it out, how can members of the school community act to stop it? Getting a better grasp of school shootings, as challenging as it might be, is a clear priority for preventing harm and disruption for kids, staff, and families. This post considers what we know about K-12 school shootings and what we might do going forward to alleviate their harms.

Who is perpetrating school shootings?

As the National Association of School Psychologists says, “There is NO profile of a student who will cause harm.” Indeed, any attempt to develop profiles of school shooters is an ill-advised and potentially dangerous strategy. Profiling risks wrongly including many children who would never consider committing a violent act and wrongly excluding some children who might. However, while an overemphasis on personal warning signs is problematic, there can still be value in identifying certain commonalities behind school shootings. These highlight problems that can be addressed to minimize the occurrence of school shootings, and they can play a pivotal role in helping the school community know when to check in—either with an individual directly or with someone close to them (such as a parent or guidance counselor). Carefully integrating this approach into a broader prevention strategy helps school personnel understand the roots of violent school incidents and assess risks in a way that avoids the recklessness of profiling.

Within this framework of threat assessment, exploring similarities and differences of school shootings—if done responsibly—can be useful to prevention efforts. To that end, I recently published a study with colleagues that examined the extent to which features common to school shootings prior to 2003 were still relevant today. We compared the antecedents of K-12 shootings, college/university shootings, and other mass shootings.

We found that the majority of school shooters are male (95%) and white (61%) –yet many of these individuals feel marginalized. Indeed, almost half of those who perpetrate K-12 shootings report a history of rejection, with many experiencing bullying. One 16-year-old shooter wrote , “I feel rejected, rejected, not so much alone, but rejected. I feel this way because the day-to-day treatment I get usually it’s positive but the negative is like a cut, it doesn’t go away really fast.” Prior to the Parkland shooting, the perpetrator said , “I had enough of being—telling me that I’m an idiot and a dumbass.” A 14-year-old shooter stated in court, “I felt like I wasn’t wanted by anyone, especially  my mom. ” These individuals felt rejected and insignificant.

Our study also found that more than half of K-12 shooters have a history of psychological problems (e.g., depression, suicidal ideation, bipolar disorder, and psychotic episodes). The individuals behind the Sandy Hook and Columbine shootings, among others, had been diagnosed with an assortment of psychological conditions. (Of course, the vast majority of children with diagnosed psychological conditions don’t commit an act of mass violence. Indeed, psychologists and psychiatrists have warned that simply blaming mental illness for mass shootings unfairly stigmatizes those with diagnoses and ignores other, potentially more salient factors behind incidents of mass violence.) For some, the long-term rejection is compounded by a more acute rejection experience that immediately precedes the shooting. While K-12 school shooters were less likely than other mass shooters to experience an acute, traumatic event shortly before the shooting, these events are not uncommon.

Many shooters also display a fascination with guns and/or a preoccupation with violence. They play violent video games, watch violent movies, and read books that glorify violence and killing. Several of the shooters showed a particular fascination with Columbine, Hitler, and/or Satanism. They wrote journals or drew images depicting violence and gore. The continued exposure to violence may desensitize individuals to violence and provide ideas that are then copied in the school shootings.

To reiterate, however, there is no true profile of a school shooter. Plenty of people are bullied in middle and high school without entertaining thoughts of shooting classmates. Similarly, making and breaking relationships goes along with high school culture, yet most people who experience a break-up do not think of harming others. Anxiety and depression are common, especially in adolescence, and countless adolescents play violent video games without committing acts of violence in real life. Even if some commonalities are evident, we must recognize their limits.

What can we do?

Understanding the experiences of school shooters can reveal important insights for discerning how to prevent school shootings. So, what might we do about it?

First, the problems that appear to underlie some school shootings, such as bullying and mental-health challenges, need attention—and there’s a lot we can do. School administrators and educators need to implement bullying prevention programs, and they need to pay attention to the mental-health needs of their students. One way to do this is to facilitate “ psychological mattering ” in schools. Students who feel like they matter—that they are important or significant to others—are less likely to feel isolated, ostracized, and alone. They feel confident that there are people to whom they can turn for support. To the extent that mattering is encouraged in schools, bullying should decrease. Typically, we don’t bully people who are important or significant to us.

Second, because most of the perpetrators of K-12 shootings are under the age of 18, they cannot legally acquire guns. In our study , handguns were used in over 91% of the K-12 shootings, and almost half of the shooters stole the gun from a family member. Without guns, there cannot be school shootings. Clearly more needs to be done to keep guns out of the hands of youth in America.

Third, students, staff, and parents must pay attention to explicit signals of an imminent threat. Many shooters leak information about their plans well before the shooting. They may create a video, write in a journal, warn certain classmates not to attend school on a particular day, brag about their plans, or try to enlist others’ help in their plot. Social media has provided a venue for children to disclose their intentions. Yet, students, parents, and educators often ignore or downplay the warning signs of an imminent threat. Students often think their peers are simply expressing threats as a way of garnering attention. Even if the threats are taken seriously, an unwritten code of silence keeps many students from reporting what they see or hear. They don’t want to be a snitch or risk being the target of the would-be shooter’s rage. With this in mind, educators and administrators need to encourage reporting among students—even anonymously—and need to take those reports extremely seriously. Helpful information for teachers, administrators, and parents can be found at SchoolSafety.gov . In addition, Sandy Hook Promise provides information about school violence and useful videos for young people about attending to the warning signs that often accompany school shootings.

Fourth, school leaders should be aware that not every apparent act of prevention is worth the costs. Some people believe that lockdown drills, metal detectors, school resource officers, and the like are useful deterrents to school shootings and school violence more broadly. However, researchers have also demonstrated that they can increase anxiety and fear among students . Students may also become habituated to the drills, failing to recognize the seriousness of an actual threat should it arise. Additionally, most K-12 shooters are students within the school itself. These students are well-versed in the security measures taken by the school to try to deter acts of violence by individuals such as themselves. While few would suggest getting rid of lockdown drills and other security measures, educators and administrators need to be mindful of the rewards versus the costs in their selection of safety measures.

Ultimately, our goal should be creating an environment in which school shootings never occur. This is an ambitious aim, and it will be challenging work. But addressing some key issues, such as mental health, will go a long way toward preventing future tragedies in our schools. As so aptly demonstrated in the Ted Talk, “ I was almost a school shooter ,” by Aaron Stark, making someone feel that they have value and that they matter can go a long way toward altering that individual’s life and, consequently, the lives of others.

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School Shootings in US Reach Highest Recorded Levels

School shootings in the US surged over the past 25 years and mass shootings that occurred at kindergarten through 12th-grade school sites became more deadly, according to a study in Pediatrics .

The researchers analyzed data from 2 public databases involving 1453 school shootings and mass school shootings between 1997-1998 and 2021-2022. They defined school shootings as anytime someone pulled out a gun or fired one; mass school shootings are those in which at least 3 people were killed.

Almost 800 school shootings occurred between 2017 and 2022, which is 135 more shootings than took place during the previous 15 years combined, the researchers found. And although the number of mass shootings per year has remained stable during the 25-year period, they have become more dangerous since 2012. The largest number of people—57—died or were injured during the 2017-2018 school year, with the second-largest number dying or being injured during 2021-2022.

Pediatricians can play an important role in reducing firearm injuries in children, the authors of a linked commentary noted. They can be better trained to counsel families to store firearms securely: “locked up, unloaded, and with ammunition locked and stored separately.” Clinicians can also advocate for policy changes, such as calling for more regulation of semiautomatic military-style firearms and large-capacity magazines.

Published Online: March 29, 2024. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.3706

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May 25, 2022

What We Know about Mass School Shootings—and Shooters—in the U.S.

Criminologists explain what the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., and other deadly assaults have in common

By James Densley , Jillian Peterson & The Conversation US

Law enforcement officers speak together outside of Robb Elementary School following the mass shooting on May 24, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas. According to reports, 19 students and 2 adults were killed, with the gunman fatally shot by law enforcement.

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation , an online publication covering the latest research.

When the Columbine High School massacre took place in 1999 it was seen as a watershed moment in the United States – the worst mass shooting at a school in the country’s history.

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Now, it ranks fourth. The three school shootings to surpass its death toll of 13 – 12 students, one teacher – have all taken place within the last decade: 2012’s Sandy Hook Elementary attack , in which a gunman killed 26 children and school staff; the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which claimed the lives of 17 people ; and now the Robb Elementary School assault in Uvalde, Texas, where on May 24, 2022, at least 19 children and two adults were murdered.

We are criminologists who study the life histories of public mass shooters in the U.S. As part of that research, we built a comprehensive database of mass public shootings using public data, with the shooters coded on over 200 different variables, including location and racial profile. For the purposes of our database, mass public shootings are defined as incidents in which four or more victims are murdered with at least one of those homicides taking place in a public location and with no connection to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs.

Our database shows that since 1966, when our database timeline begins, there have been 13 such shootings at schools across the U.S – the first in Stockton, California , in 1989.

Four of those shootings – including the one at Robb Elementary School – involved a killing at another location, always a family member at a residence. There have been reports the most recent perpetrator shot his grandmother prior to going to the school in Uvalde, although that has yet to be officially confirmed.

The majority of mass school shootings were carried out by a lone gunman, with just two – Columbine and the 1998 shooting at Westside School in Jonesboro, Arkansas – carried out by two gunmen. In all, some 146 people were killed in the attacks and at least 182 victims injured.*

The choice of “gunmen” to describe the perpetrators is accurate – all of the mass school shootings in our database were carried out by men or boys . And the average age of those involved in carrying out the attacks was 18.

This fits with the picture that has emerged of the shooter in the Robb Elementary School attack . He turned 18 just days ago and purchased two military-style weapons thought to be the ones used in the attack.

Police have yet to release key information on the shooter, including what motivated him to kill the children and adults at Robb Elementary School. The picture of the shooter that has emerged conforms to the profile we have built up from past perpetrators in some ways, but diverges in others.

We know that most school shooters have a connection to the school they target. Twelve of the 14 school shooters in our database prior to the most recent attack in Texas were either current or former students of the school. Any prior connection between the latest shooter and Robb Elementary School has not been released to the public.

Our research and dozens of interviews with incarcerated perpetrators of mass shootings suggests that for most perpetrators, the mass shooting event is intended to be a final act. The majority of school mass shooters die in the attack. Of the 15 mass school shooters in our database, just seven were apprehended. The rest died on the scene, nearly all by suicide – the lone exception being the Robb Elementary shooter, who was shot dead by police.

And school shooters tend to preempt their attacks by leaving posts, messages or videos warning of their intent.

Inspired by past school shooters, some perpetrators are seeking fame and notoriety . However, most school shooters are motivated by a generalized anger. Their path to violence involves self-hate and despair turned outward at the world, and our research finds they often communicate their intent to do harm in advance as a final, desperate cry for help . The key to stopping these tragedies is for society to be alert to these warning signs and act on them immediately.

This article was originally published on The Conversation . Read the original article .

*Editor’s Note (5/25/22): Our partners at The Conversation have edited this sentence after posting to correct the date of the shooting at Westside School in Jonesboro, Ark.

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Five Facts About Mass Shootings in K-12 Schools

Preventing mass shootings in the United States, particularly those occurring in school settings, is an important priority for families, government leaders and officials, public safety agencies, mental health professionals, educators, and local communities. What does the evidence say about how to detect, prevent, and respond to these tragic events? Here’s what we’ve learned through NIJ-sponsored research: [1]

1. Most people who commit a mass shooting are in crisis leading up to it and are likely to leak their plans to others, presenting opportunities for intervention.

Before their acts of violence, most individuals who carry out a K-12 mass shooting show outward signs of crisis. Through social media and other means, they often publicly broadcast a high degree of personal instability and an inability to cope in their current mental state. Almost all are actively suicidal.

Case studies show that most of these individuals engage in warning behaviors, usually leaking their plans directly to peers or through social media. [2] Yet most leaks of K-12 mass shooting plans are not reported to authorities before the shooting.

Research shows that leaking mass shooting plans is associated with a cry for help. [3] Analyses of case reports from successfully averted K-12 mass shootings point to crisis intervention as a promising strategy for K-12 mass shooting prevention. [4] Programs and strategies found to prevent school shootings and school violence generally could hold promise for preventing school mass shootings as well.

2. Everyone can help prevent school mass shootings.

Most individuals who carry out a K-12 mass shooting are insiders, with some connection to the school they target. Often, they are current or former students.

Research suggests that communities can help prevent school mass shootings by working together to address student crises and trauma, recognizing and reporting threats of violence, and following up consistently.

Two-thirds of foiled plots in all mass shootings (including school mass shootings) are detected through public reporting. Having a mechanism in place to collect information on threats of possible school violence and thwarted attempts is a good first step.

The School Safety Tip Line Toolkit is one resource to consider for developing and implementing a school tip line. [5] The Mass Attacks Defense Toolkit details evidence-based suggestions for recognizing warning signs and creating collaborative systems to follow up consistently in each case. [6] The Averted School Violence Database enables schools to share details about averted school violence incidents and lessons learned that can prevent future acts of violence. [7]

3. Threat assessment is a promising prevention strategy to assess and respond to mass shooting threats, as well as other threats of violence by students.

For schools that adopt threat assessment protocols, school communities are educated to assess threats of violence reported to them. [8] Threat assessment teams, including school officials, mental health personnel, and law enforcement, respond to each threat as warranted by the circumstances. An appropriate response might include referral of a student to mental health professionals, involvement of law enforcement, or both.

Emphasizing the mental health needs of students who pose threats can encourage their student peers to report on those threats without fear of being stigmatized as a “snitch.” In an evaluation study, educating students on this distinction increased their willingness to report threats. [9]

Many educational and public safety experts agree that threat assessment can be a valuable tool. But an ongoing challenge for schools is to implement threat assessment in a manner that minimizes unintended negative consequences. [10]

4. Individuals who commit a school shooting are most likely to obtain a weapon by theft from a family member, indicating a need for more secure firearm storage practices.

In an open-source database study, 80% of individuals who carried out a K-12 mass shooting stole the firearm used in the shooting from a family member. [11] In contrast, those who committed mass shootings outside of schools often purchased guns lawfully (77%).

K-12 mass shootings were more likely to involve the use of a semi-automatic assault weapon than mass shootings in other settings, but handguns were still the most common weapon used in K-12 mass shootings.

Explore more information about the backgrounds, guns, and motivations of individuals who commit mass shootings using The Violence Project interactive database. [12]

5. The overwhelming majority of individuals who commit K-12 mass shootings struggle with various aspects of mental well-being.

Nearly all individuals who carried out a K-12 mass shooting (92%-100%) were found to be suicidal before or during the shooting. [13] Most experienced significant childhood hardship or trauma. Those who commit K-12 mass shootings commonly have histories of antisocial behavior and, in a minority of cases, various forms of psychoses.

Despite the prevalence of mental well-being struggles in these individuals’ life histories, studies suggest that profiling based on mental health does not aid prevention. [14] However, research on common psychological factors associated with K-12 mass shootings, along with other factors that precipitate school violence, can help inform targeted intervention in coordination with crisis intervention, threat assessment, and improved firearm safety practices.

Learn more from these NIJ reports:

• Understanding the Causes of School Violence Using Open Source Data
• A Multi-Level, Multi-Method Investigation of the Psycho-Social Life Histories of Mass Shooters
• The Causes and Consequences of School Violence: A Review
• A Comprehensive School Safety Framework: Report to the Committees on Appropriations

[note 1] National Institute of Justice funding award description, “Student Threat Assessment as a Safe and Supportive Prevention Strategy,” at the Rector & Visitors of the University of Virginia, award number 2014-CK-BX-0004 ; National Institute of Justice funding award description, “Understanding the Causes of School Violence Using Open Source Data,” at the Research Foundation of the City University of New York, award number 2016-CK-BX-0013 ; National Institute of Justice funding award description, “Mass Shooter Database,” at Hamline University, award number 2018-75-CX-0023 , and National Institute of Justice funding award description, “Improving the Understanding of Mass Shooting Plots,” at the RAND Corporation, award number 2019-R2-CX-0003 .

[note 2] Meagan N. Abel, Steven Chermak, and Joshua D. Freilich, “ Pre-Attack Warning Behaviors of 20 Adolescent School Shooters: A Case Study Analysis ,” Crime & Delinquency 68 no. 5 (2022): 786-813.

[note 3] Jillian Peterson et al., “ Communication of Intent To Do Harm Preceding Mass Public Shootings in the United States, 1966 to 2019 ,” JAMA Network Open 4 no. 11 (2021): e2133073.

[note 4] Abel, Chermak, and Freilich, “Pre-Attack Warning Behaviors”; and Jillian Peterson and James Densley, The Violence Project: How To Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic (New York: Abrams Press, 2021).

[note 5] Michael Planty et al., School Safety Tip Line Toolkit , Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI International.

[note 6] RAND Corporation, “ Mass Attacks Defense Toolkit: Preventing Mass Attacks, Saving Lives ."

[note 7] National Police Foundation, Averted School Violence (ASV) Database: 2021 Analysis Update , Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

[note 8] Dewey Cornell and Jennifer Maeng, “ Student Threat Assessment as a Safe and Supportive Prevention Strategy, Final Technical Report ,” Final report to the National Institute of Justice, award number 2014-CK-BX-0004, August 2020, NCJ 255102.

[note 9] Shelby L. Stohlman and Dewey G. Cornell, “ An Online Educational Program To Increase Student Understanding of Threat Assessment ,” Journal of School Heath 89 no. 11 (2019): 899-906.

[note 10] Cornell and Maeng, “Student Threat Assessment.”

[note 11] Jillian Peterson, “ A Multi-Level, Multi-Method Investigation of the Psycho-Social Life Histories of Mass Shooters ,” Final report to the National Institute of Justice, award number 2018-75-CX-0023, September 2021, NCJ 302101.

[note 12] The Violence Project, “ Mass Shooter Database .”

[note 13] Peterson, “A Multi-Level, Multi-Method Investigation.” 14Dewey G. Cornell, “ Threat Assessment as a School Violence Prevention Strategy ,” Criminology & Public Policy 19 no. 1 (2020): 235-252.

[note 14] Dewey G. Cornell, “Threat Assessment as a School Violence Prevention Strategy,” Criminology & Public Policy 19 no. 1 (2020): 235-252, https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12471.

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About 1 in 4 u.s. teachers say their school went into a gun-related lockdown in the last school year.

Twenty-five years after the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado , a majority of public K-12 teachers (59%) say they are at least somewhat worried about the possibility of a shooting ever happening at their school. This includes 18% who say they’re extremely or very worried, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to better understand public K-12 teachers’ views on school shootings, how prepared they feel for a potential active shooter, and how they feel about policies that could help prevent future shootings.

To do this, we surveyed 2,531 U.S. public K-12 teachers from Oct. 17 to Nov. 14, 2023. The teachers are members of RAND’s American Teacher Panel, a nationally representative panel of public school K-12 teachers recruited through MDR Education. Survey data is weighted to state and national teacher characteristics to account for differences in sampling and response to ensure they are representative of the target population.

We also used data from our 2022 survey of U.S. parents. For that project, we surveyed 3,757 U.S. parents with at least one child younger than 18 from Sept. 20 to Oct. 2, 2022. Find more details about the survey of parents here .

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

Another 31% of teachers say they are not too worried about a shooting occurring at their school. Only 7% of teachers say they are not at all worried.

This survey comes at a time when school shootings are at a record high (82 in 2023) and gun safety continues to be a topic in 2024 election campaigns .

Teachers’ experiences with lockdowns

About a quarter of teachers (23%) say they experienced a lockdown in the 2022-23 school year because of a gun or suspicion of a gun at their school. Some 15% say this happened once during the year, and 8% say this happened more than once.

High school teachers are most likely to report experiencing these lockdowns: 34% say their school went on at least one gun-related lockdown in the last school year. This compares with 22% of middle school teachers and 16% of elementary school teachers.

Teachers in urban schools are also more likely to say that their school had a gun-related lockdown. About a third of these teachers (31%) say this, compared with 19% of teachers in suburban schools and 20% in rural schools.

Do teachers feel their school has prepared them for an active shooter?

About four-in-ten teachers (39%) say their school has done a fair or poor job providing them with the training and resources they need to deal with a potential active shooter.

A smaller share (30%) give their school an excellent or very good rating, and another 30% say their school has done a good job preparing them.

Teachers in urban schools are the least likely to say their school has done an excellent or very good job preparing them for a potential active shooter. About one-in-five (21%) say this, compared with 32% of teachers in suburban schools and 35% in rural schools.

Teachers who have police officers or armed security stationed in their school are more likely than those who don’t to say their school has done an excellent or very good job preparing them for a potential active shooter (36% vs. 22%).

Overall, 56% of teachers say they have police officers or armed security stationed at their school. Majorities in rural schools (64%) and suburban schools (56%) say this, compared with 48% in urban schools.

Only 3% of teachers say teachers and administrators at their school are allowed to carry guns in school. This is slightly more common in school districts where a majority of voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2020 than in school districts where a majority of voters cast ballots for Joe Biden (5% vs. 1%).

What strategies do teachers think could help prevent school shootings?

The survey also asked teachers how effective some measures would be at preventing school shootings.

Most teachers (69%) say improving mental health screening and treatment for children and adults would be extremely or very effective.

About half (49%) say having police officers or armed security in schools would be highly effective, while 33% say the same about metal detectors in schools.

Just 13% say allowing teachers and school administrators to carry guns in schools would be extremely or very effective at preventing school shootings. Seven-in-ten teachers say this would be not too or not at all effective.

How teachers’ views differ by party

Republican and Republican-leaning teachers are more likely than Democratic and Democratic-leaning teachers to say each of the following would be highly effective:

• Having police officers or armed security in schools (69% vs. 37%)
• Having metal detectors in schools (43% vs. 27%)
• Allowing teachers and school administrators to carry guns in schools (28% vs. 3%)

And while majorities in both parties say improving mental health screening and treatment would be highly effective at preventing school shootings, Democratic teachers are more likely than Republican teachers to say this (73% vs. 66%).

Parents’ views on school shootings and prevention strategies

In fall 2022, we asked parents a similar set of questions about school shootings.

Roughly a third of parents with K-12 students (32%) said they were extremely or very worried about a shooting ever happening at their child’s school. An additional 37% said they were somewhat worried.

As is the case among teachers, improving mental health screening and treatment was the only strategy most parents (63%) said would be extremely or very effective at preventing school shootings. And allowing teachers and school administrators to carry guns in schools was seen as the least effective – in fact, half of parents said this would be not too or not at all effective. This question was asked of all parents with a child younger than 18, regardless of whether they have a child in K-12 schools.

Like teachers, parents’ views on strategies for preventing school shootings differed by party. 

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

June 17, 2022

Why do school shootings keep happening in the United States?

Vcu homeland security expert william v. pelfrey jr. answers this question and more., share this story.

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By Joan Tupponce

The first thought that raced through William Pelfrey Jr.’s mind when he heard the breaking news about the school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, was typical of any parent with young kids.

“It made me want to get into my vehicle and drive to their schools,” said Pelfrey, Ph.D., an expert in the field of homeland security, terrorism and radicalization and a professor of homeland security/emergency preparedness and criminal justice in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. “From a professional perspective, it reminded me there are too many people with guns, the wrong people with guns and that nothing is going to change.”

Guns are now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. No other developed economy has as many violent firearm deaths as the U.S., according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

“School shootings happen in the U.S. at an alarming rate, but they rarely happen elsewhere in the world. Eighty or 90 percent of all the school shootings in the world happen in the U.S. They are concentrated here,” Pelfrey said.

How did the U.S. get to this point and what can be done? Pelfrey fields those questions and more with VCU News.

Why does this keep happening?

It’s a simple question, but the answers are extremely complicated. There are some political overtones to it. Guns are ubiquitous in the U.S. There are more guns than people. The U.S. population is about 334 million and the number of guns in the U.S. is more than 390 million (according to a report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based organization). We have the highest civilian gun ownership in the world by a huge margin. That’s an extraordinary number relative to the rest of the world. The next countries that have as many guns are war-torn countries like Serbia or Yemen.

Another element is school safety is not as high as it should be. It’s easy to maintain basic school safety but not everybody does a good job of that.

A third element is social media, a component that revolves around how people make it OK on social media to act on violence. There is a faction of government, particularly a right-wing government element, that condones or encourages violence. They do so in an oblique way saying something like, “Our country is under threat. We have to stand up and protect our country. We need to take up arms to defend our country, our way of life.” When you do that, you are condoning acts that are dangerous. The U.S. border is populated by a lot of citizens who have dubbed themselves border protection and they stand at the border with guns waiting for someone to illegally cross the border and they take them into custody even though they are not law enforcement.

How do you categorize mass shootings?

Some are artifacts of bullying. A victim of bullying decides they are going to respond with extreme violence, and it’s usually not against their perpetrators. It’s a show of force to demonstrate they won’t be bullied again. They can stand up for themselves. That describes Sandy Hook and Columbine and some other shootings.

The second category of mass shootings is domestic terrorism. Those people had been self-radicalized on social media and believe their actions represent a higher good. What they are doing is for a bigger purpose than themselves. They are willing to die, almost like a suicide terrorist, to further the goals of the theology they support.

A lot of people don’t fit into either category. The mass shooting era began with Charles Whitman in 1966 when he climbed a bell tower at the University of Texas and started shooting people. He did that because he had a tumor in his brain. There was no kind of pattern, but it created a behavioral matrix that has been followed by any number of people in the U.S.

How easy is it to buy a gun?

In the U.S., you can walk into a gun store and buy as many assault rifles as you want if you have cash and are over 18 and you meet just a couple of other loose criteria. Guns are so easily obtained that it’s easy to commit violent crime. We don’t do a good job in our criminal justice system of prohibiting people that probably shouldn’t have them from securing guns.

In most countries there are tests you have to take. You have to demonstrate you need a gun for a specific reason. You have to pass a gun ownership exam to show you can use it safely. You have to maintain license requirements. We don’t do any of that in the U.S. We are going the other way. Texas last year made it easier for people to get a gun in what was already an incredibly permissive state.

What types of guns are especially dangerous to own?

Assault weapons — assault rifles and assault pistols. We don’t track who buys them. You go into a gun store and buy a gun. A criminal background check is run, but no one keeps track of what you bought or how much you paid for it or what you do with it when you walk out the door. You could buy 20 assault rifles, drive to Washington, D.C., and sell them and nobody knows it because there is no reporting mechanism to identify that you sold the guns.

It is a crime to sell a gun to a convicted felon or to take them out of state to sell. But our penalties are so lax that it’s not a deterrent. A straw buyer is a person who buys guns legally and then illegally sells them for profit. There are a small number of gun stores that welcome straw buyers and subsequently represent easy funnels for guns in illegal locations. Straw buyers go to stores where they know they can walk in with $30,000 or $40,000 in cash and walk out with a bunch of pistols and assault rifles and go back to the streets and sell those guns, especially in cities with restrictive gun laws. That’s one of the cheap mechanisms for guns getting into the hands of criminals.

Why is screening a person who wants to buy a gun so important?

There are people who should have red flags that would preclude gun ownership, but we don’t have that in place. We could look over the past 20 or so years at some of the major school shootings like Parkwood (Florida); Newtown (Connecticut); Columbine (Colorado); Uvalde (Texas); even the shooting in Buffalo (New York). These were people that had a history of mental illness or a history of being bullied and were threatening to lash out. People don’t seem to connect the risk factors to gun ownership and the propensity for subsequent violence. And that is just a tragedy.

What is the role of social media in all of this?

It has a powerful role because of far-right extremism. The Buffalo shooter was a self-radicalized domestic terrorist. He had a strongly held belief about the infringement of races on the Caucasian race. He was an avid follower of far-right extremists’ diatribe and used some of what he found as rationalization to act and commit violence.

Not true for every shooter. In Columbine, Newtown, Uvaldi, these were bullied misfits. They didn’t fit in groups and had a history of being marginalized by their peers. They found a different path for getting even and that was through violence. But there is a different population and I believe it’s one of the most dangerous threats to the U.S. and that is far-right extremists, which inspired far-right violent extremists. Social media has a tremendous role in that. There is no single bad guy we can legitimize or take out. There are hundreds of podcasts and thousands of self-proclaimed thought leaders and they write really nasty, vicious stuff and have followers. Some of those people act on what they read. No government entity does a good job counter-messaging extremists.

How does bullying play into this?

Schools don’t do a great job with bullying prevention. One of my areas of research is bullying and cyberbullying. I’ve worked with schools, and we talk about bullying identification. Schools don’t do that until it’s too late. Schools need to adopt bullying and cyberbullying identification measures and then practice them. The best tactic I’ve seen is analogous to the “see something, say something” messaging that was rampant in New York after 9/11. That same logic can be applied in schools to enable citizens to get involved in terrorism prevention. Students can be empowered to identify bullies and then the school can come in to support fellow students.

Some people talk about arming teachers or school administrators. What do you think of that as a way of prevention?

Several years ago, Virginia considered doing that. I did a report for the Department of Criminal Justice Services in Virginia on the merits and risks of arming school personnel. Most high schools have an armed resource officer on scene, but most middle and elementary schools don’t. Arming teachers or school personnel is an incredibly dangerous enterprise that could lead to the death of that person because if police respond to a shooting and see someone with a gun, they are going to shoot them. Or, the teacher could accidentally shoot another staff member or police officer or, in the worst case, a student.

At Uvalde, there was a police resource officer on scene, at Columbine a school resource officer was on scene, at Parkland a school resource officer was on scene. If a trained police officer can’t prevent a school shooting, what are the chances that a teacher who is not well trained can prevent a school shooting? I think the odds are pretty low. I think the risk dramatically outweighs any potential benefits.

Can you talk about the opposite views we have in the U.S. about guns?

We live in a country with two competing paradigms. One thought paradigm is that everybody needs guns and then we will all be safe. The other is the exact opposite. Nobody should have guns and we will all be safe. Those two paradigms cannot coexist. They are diametrically opposed. But our political structure is such that they can’t be reconciled.

After the Sandy Hook shooting there was a huge motivation for gun control, limiting who could buy guns and the kind of guns people could buy. That faded away rapidly. I expect the same thing will happen here, and it’s depressing to say that, but I see very little political will to enact any meaningful changes.

Mass shootings are going to happen again. It’s a pattern. School shootings and mass shootings happen about every year or two in the U.S. and I guarantee that there is going to be another one in a year and another one after that and nothing is going to change until enough people develop a political will to support meaningful gun changes.

What predictions do you have for the future when it comes to gun laws?

I expect there will be some change in gun laws, but they won’t be substantial. It will provide political cover for some people to say we are doing things, we are making things safer, but they won’t make things safer. I expect gun sales will go up even more because people now feel like they have to protect themselves and their family members because the government isn’t doing that.

I also expect that there is going to be some investigation into police practices at Uvalde because police didn’t go into that school immediately. In fact, several police officers stood outside waiting for reinforcements to arrive. That is going to lead to internal investigation and also police policy changes, which I expect will become popular across the U.S. Many police departments implemented a policy suggesting officers need to go into a school and engage an active shooter no matter what. That didn’t happen in Uvalde. As a policing expert, I don’t know how that is possible.

Do people use mental health as a scapegoat for these shootings?

Yes, it’s an easy target. A lot of people point to mental health and say the U.S. needs more mental health funding. They disregard there was a gun that shot these people. Only a small percentage of these shootings were people that had been diagnosed with a mental illness. We want to rationalize this type of behavior. We want to understand it. We presume that the people who commit these vile acts are disturbed, that they are mentally ill, otherwise they are like us and that’s untenable.

It creates an easy political target that allows politicians to rationalize their failure to enact reasonable gun laws. We have laws about who can buy guns — you have to be 18, you can’t be a convicted felon. There are guns that are restrictive. It’s not legal to sell fully automatic weapons. You can’t buy a tank. But whenever reasonable gun restrictions are opposed or discussed, there is a small faction of citizens and politicians that go crazy, and that’s a tragedy.

Over the past 50 years there has only been one meaningful law passed limiting guns — the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, passed under President Bill Clinton. That expired 10 years later under a Republican president. When that expired, people began buying guns at a substantially higher rate than ever before. They presumed that under another Democratic president or Congress gun sales would be limited again. So assault rifles, which had been a small portion of gun purchases prior to the ban, became a big part of gun sales.

Estimates are that a quarter to a third of all guns sold now in the U.S. are assault rifle platforms. That is a big number. Seven years after the ban expired, guns sales had doubled. A few years later they doubled again. It’s amazing that the ban had a counter-productive effect, which is it dramatically increased gun sales and people’s motivations to buy guns, particularly assault rifles.

As a policing expert, there is no reason anyone who is not military or law enforcement should ever have an assault rifle. I come from a family of hunters. Every year we would go hunting. I know rifles and shotguns. An assault rifle is a vastly inferior tool for anything other than shooting people. It’s not good for hunting or self-defense. A shotgun or a pistol is more effective. There is no reason for a civilian to have an assault rifle, but they do.

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Panic Buttons, Classroom Locks: How Schools Have Boosted Security

A new survey shows increased investments in safety measures over the past five years. Yet there are more campus gun incidents than ever.

By Sarah Mervosh

When Adam Lane became principal at Haines City High School eight years ago, there was little to stop an attacker from entering the school, which sits alongside orange groves, a livestock farm and a cemetery in Central Florida.

“You could drive right up, walk right in the front office,” Mr. Lane said.

Today, the school is surrounded by a 10-foot fence, and access to the grounds is carefully controlled via specific gates. Visitors must press a buzzer to be let into the front office. More than 40 cameras monitor key areas.

New federal data released on Thursday offers insight into the many, growing ways that schools have amped up security over the past five years, as the country has recorded three of the deadliest school shootings on record, and as other, more routine gun incidents on school grounds have also become more frequent.

About two-thirds of public schools in the United States now control access to school grounds — not just the building — during the school day, up from about half in the 2017-2018 school year. An estimated 43 percent of public schools have a “panic button” or silent alarm that connect directly with the police in case of emergency, up from 29 percent five years ago. And a stronger majority, 78 percent, equip classrooms with locks, up from 65 percent, according to survey data released by the National Center for Education Statistics, a research arm of the U.S. Education Department.

In a sign of how much security is a part of regular school life, nearly a third of public schools reported holding evacuation drills nine or more times a year.

Some practices that have stirred the most debate have also grown but are less widespread. Random metal detector use was reported in 9 percent of public schools, with daily use reported in 6 percent. And while many schools have campus police, just 3 percent of public schools reported arming teachers or other nonsecurity employees.

The data was collected in a survey of more than 1,000 public schools in November.

Even as schools spend billions of dollars on security, the number of gun incidents at schools has only grown. The latest tragedy unfolded last week in Virginia, where the police said a first grader, just 6 years old, brought a gun from home and used it to seriously injure his teacher.

Last year, more than 330 people were fatally shot or wounded on school grounds, up from 218 in 2018, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database , a research project that tracks instances in which a gun is fired or brandished on school property. The overall number of incidents — which can include cases where no one was injured — also increased to more than 300, up from about 120 in 2018, and as few as 22 in 1999, the year of the Columbine High School shooting, when two teenagers killed 13 people .

The uptick in school gun violence comes amid a broader increase in active shooter incidents and gun deaths in the United States. Overall, schools are still quite safe.

School shootings are “very, very rare,” said David Riedman, the founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.

His tracker identified 300 schools with gun incidents last year, a tiny fraction of the nearly 130,000 schools in the United States. School shootings account for less than 1 percent of the total gun deaths suffered by American children.

Yet, the growing toll has put more onus on schools to not only educate, feed and counsel children, but also protect them from harm. Best practices include simple solutions like locking classroom doors and limiting access to schools.

But experts say many “deterrent” measures — like metal detectors, clear backpacks or having armed staff members on campus — have not been shown to reliably prevent shootings . Other tools, like security cameras or panic buttons, may help interrupt violence in the moment but are unlikely to forestall shootings.

“There is not a lot of evidence that they work,” Marc Zimmerman, co-director of the National Center for School Safety at the University of Michigan, said of many of the safety measures. “If you press a panic button, it probably means somebody is already shooting or threatening to shoot. That is not prevention.”

Increasing security can also come with its own risks. A recent study found that Black students are four times as likely as students of other races to be enrolled in high surveillance schools, and that students at those schools can pay a “safety tax” in academic outcomes and suspensions because of those measures.

The most effective time to stop a school shooting, experts say, is before a gun ever gets to campus.

Because most school shootings are carried out by current or recent students, their peers are often best positioned to notice and report a threat, said Frank Straub, director of the Center for Targeted Violence Prevention at the National Policing Institute, who studies averted school shootings.

“Many of these people engage in what’s called leakage —they post online, they’ll tell a friend,” Mr. Straub said. He added that teachers, parents and others should also look out for signs: a child becoming withdrawn and depressed, a student drawing doodles of guns in a notebook.

“Fundamentally, we have to do a better job of recognizing K-12 students that are struggling,” he said. “And that’s expensive. It’s very difficult to prove what you prevented.”

Most school shootings, though, are not planned, mass attacks.

“The most common occurrence — throughout history and throughout the last couple of years as things have dramatically increased — is there are fights that escalate into shootings,” said Mr. Riedman of the K-12 School Shooting Database. He pointed to national upticks in shootings, and said the data suggests that there are simply more people, even adults, bringing guns to school campuses.

Christi Barrett, the superintendent of Hemet Unified School District in Southern California, knows that no matter what she does, she cannot fully eliminate the possibility of risk for each of the 22,000 students and thousands of employees in her sprawling district, which spans 28 schools and nearly 700 square miles.

But she has worked to be proactive, starting several years ago with a locked door policy for every classroom.

The district is also in the midst of transitioning to electronic door locks, which she hopes will reduce any “human variable” or fumbling with keys in a crisis. “If there is an intruder, an active shooter, we have the ability to lock down everything instantaneously,” she said.

School officials also had rolled out occasional, random metal detector searches in some high schools, with mixed results.

The devices sometimes flagged innocuous items, like school binders, while missing weapons when the devices were not in use. And though she said the searches did not focus on any groups, she acknowledged broader concerns about the disparate impact school surveillance can have on students of color .

“Even with it being random, that perception can be there,” said Dr. Barrett, whose district is largely Hispanic, with smaller populations of white and Black students.

Now, every middle and high school in the district has a more universal system, which is designed to specifically detect the metal in firearms. “Every student goes through it,” she said, adding that no guns had been identified so far this year.

To address students’ mental health, she said, there are counselors in every school. And a software program flags when a student types trigger words — like “suicide,” or “shooting” — on district-issued devices to better identify children who need help.

She said terrifying mass shootings at schools in recent years — in Parkland, Fla., Santa Fe, Texas, and Uvalde, Texas — did not spur the security upgrades, so much as reaffirm them.

“It was more of a reinforcement of, ‘Let’s not get lax,’” she said.

Sarah Mervosh is a national reporter covering education. She previously covered the coronavirus pandemic and breaking news. More about Sarah Mervosh

Gun Violence in America

Background Checks Expansion: The Biden administration has approved the broadest expansion of federal background checks in decades to regulate a fast-growing shadow market  of weapons sold online, at gun shows and through private sellers that contributes to gun violence.

A Grieving Mother’s Hope: Katy Dieckhaus, whose daughter was killed in the 2023 Covent School shooting in Nashville, is pleading for compromise with those who see gun rights as sacred .

A Historic Case: On Feb. 6, an American jury convicted a parent for a mass shooting carried out by their child for the first time. Lisa Miller, a reporter who has been following the case since its beginning, explains what the verdict really means .

Echoing Through School Grounds: In a Rhode Island city, gunshots from AR-15-style weapons have become the daily soundtrack for a school within 500 yards of a police shooting range. Parents are terrified, and children have grown accustomed to the threat of violence .

The Emotional Toll: We asked Times readers how the threat of gun violence has affected the way they lead their lives. Here’s what they told us .

Gun Control: U.S. gun laws are at the center of heated exchanges between those in favor and against tougher regulations. Here’s what to know about that debate .

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Uvalde elementary school shooting

Experts say we can prevent school shootings. here's what the research says.

Jeffrey Pierre

Cory Turner

School safety experts have coalesced around a handful of important measures communities and politicians can take to protect students. LA Johnson/NPR hide caption

School safety experts have coalesced around a handful of important measures communities and politicians can take to protect students.

Before the Golden State Warriors took to the court for a pivotal playoff game on Tuesday, Steve Kerr, the team's head coach and a vocal activist, stopped the pre-game interview to say that he didn't walk to talk about basketball. The news of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, had visibly pushed him to tears. And instead of talking about the game, Kerr wanted to talk about why the shootings were becoming all too common.

27 school shootings have taken place so far this year

"There are 50 senators right now who refuse to vote on H.R. 8, which is a background check rule that the House passed a couple of years ago," Kerr said. "It's been sitting there for two years."

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., was on the Senate floor, echoing a similar sentiment on Tuesday. "Why are you here," he said to his colleagues, "if not to solve a problem as existential as this."

Can Schools Use Federal Funds To Arm Teachers?

Tuesday's violence follows a familiar pattern of previous school shootings. After every one, there's been a tendency to ask, "How do we prevent the next one?"

For years, school safety experts, and even the U.S. Secret Service, have rallied around some very clear answers. Here's what they say.

It's not a good idea to arm teachers

There's broad consensus that arming teachers is not a good policy. That's according to Matthew Mayer, a professor at Rutgers Graduate School of Education. He's been studying school violence since before Columbine, and he's part of a group of researchers who have published several position papers about why school shootings happen.

In this aerial view, law enforcement works on scene after at shooting Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images hide caption

In this aerial view, law enforcement works on scene after at shooting Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Mayer says arming teachers is a bad idea "because it invites numerous disasters and problems, and the chances of it actually helping are so minuscule."

In 2018, a Gallup poll also found that most teachers do not want to carry guns in school, and overwhelmingly favor gun control measures over security steps meant to "harden" schools. When asked which specific measures would be "most effective" at preventing school shootings, 57% of teachers favored universal background checks, and the same number, 57%, also favored banning the sale of semiautomatic weapons such as the one used in the Parkland attack.

Raise age limits for gun ownership

School safety researchers support tightening age limits for gun ownership, from 18 to 21. They say 18 years old is too young to be able to buy a gun; the teenage brain is just too impulsive. And they point out that the school shooters in Parkland, Santa Fe, Newtown, Columbine and Uvalde were all under 21.

School safety researchers also support universal background checks and banning assault-style weapons . But it's not just about how shooters legally acquire firearms. A 2019 report from the Secret Service found that in half the school shootings they studied, the gun used was either readily accessible at home or not meaningfully secured.

Of course, schools don't have control over age limits and gun storage. But there's a lot they can still do.

Schools can support the social and emotional needs of students

A lot of the conversation around making schools safer has centered on hardening schools by adding police officers and metal detectors. But experts say schools should actually focus on softening to support the social and emotional needs of students .

"Our first preventative strategy should be to make sure kids are respected, that they feel connected and belong in schools," says Odis Johnson Jr., of Johns Hopkins University's Center for Safe and Healthy Schools.

Members of the community gather at the City of Uvalde Town Square for a prayer vigil in the wake of a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images hide caption

Members of the community gather at the City of Uvalde Town Square for a prayer vigil in the wake of a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.

That means building kids' skills around conflict resolution, stress management and empathy for their fellow classmates – skills that can help reduce all sorts of unwanted behaviors, including fighting and bullying.

In its report, the Secret Service found most of the school attackers they studied had been bullied. And while we are still learning about what happened in Uvalde, early reports suggest the shooter there was a regular target of bullying.

Jackie Nowicki has led multiple school safety investigations at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. She and her team have identified some of things schools can do to make their classrooms and hallways feel safer, including "anti-bullying training for staff and teachers, adult supervision, things like hall monitors, and mechanisms to anonymously report hostile behaviors."

Active Shooter Drills May Not Stop A School Shooting — But This Method Could

The Secret Service recommends schools implement what they call a threat assessment model, where trained staff – including an administrator, a school counselor or psychologist, as well as a law enforcement representative – work together to identify and support students in crisis before they hurt others.

There's money to help schools pay for all this

One bit of good news: Because of pandemic federal aid, there's been a big jump in schools' willingness and ability to hire mental health support staff. According to the White House, with the help of federal COVID relief money, schools have seen a 65% increase in social workers, and a 17% increase in counselors.

NPR's Anya Kamenetz contributed to this story.

Did you know we tell audio stories, too? Listen to our podcasts like No Compromise, our Pulitzer-prize winning investigation into the gun rights debate, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify .

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Most US teachers worry about school shootings, survey finds

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Most US teachers worry about school shootings, survey finds

A solid majority of U.S. teachers go to work each day anxious that a shooting will unfold at their school, a trend that has paralleled the rising number of such incidents across the U.S., a report released on Friday showed.

A Pew Research Center survey of about 2,500 teachers showed that more than half of them were at least somewhat concerned and another 18% were extremely or very worried about the possibility of a shooting at their school.

Gun control and school safety have become major political and social issues in the U.S. where the number of school shootings has jumped in recent years.

There were 912 school shootings between 2021 and 2023, more than three times as many as any other three year-period in four decades of data collection, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database website.

The survey, conducted from Oct. 17 to Nov. 14, 2023, indicated that 31% of teachers in urban schools had a gun-related lockdown during the 2022-23 school year, 10 percentage points higher than teachers in both suburban and rural schools.

Only three out of 10 teachers indicated that their school had done an excellent or very good job preparing them for an active shooter, the survey showed.

More than three-fifths of teachers surveyed said improved mental health screening and treatment for children and adults would be extremely or very effective at preventing shootings. Half said police officers or armed security in schools would be highly effective.

More than a quarter of teachers who lean Republican and only 3% of who lean Democrat thought allowing teachers and school staff to carry weapons would be highly effective in stopping school shootings.

• International

May 26 Texas shooting news

By Travis Caldwell , Seán Federico-O'Murchú, Adrienne Vogt and Aditi Sangal , CNN

These are the 5 deadliest US school shootings since 2008, including Uvalde

School shootings in the US have claimed the lives of 175 children and adults since 2008.

The five deadliest shootings — in Newton, Connecticut ; Parkland, Florida ; Santa Fe, Texas ; Oxford, Michigan ; and Tuesday's mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas — account for 78 of those who've been killed.

Schumer says Senate will vote on gun safety legislation if talks fail to find bipartisan compromise 

From CNN's Clare Foran

In the wake of the Texas shooting, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for the Senate to take up the House-passed domestic terrorism prevention bill in a procedural vote set for later this morning, but acknowledged that it is unlikely to advance amid GOP opposition.

Schumer said that he is willing to give some time and space for efforts to reach some kind of bipartisan compromise on gun legislation – though he conceded that the odds are long.

He made clear that these efforts will not be given an unlimited amount of time to play out, and said that if they fail, then the Senate will move forward with votes on gun safety legislation. If that happens, those votes would be expected to fail again due to Republican opposition, but would give Democrats a chance to put lawmakers on record and criticize the GOP over gun control.

“This is not an invite to negotiate indefinitely. Make no mistake, if these negotiations do not bear fruit in a short period of time, the Senate will vote on gun safety legislation,” he said.

On the domestic terrorism bill, Schumer said, “today the Senate will have a chance to act on a pernicious issue that has recently become an increasingly prevalent component in America’s gun violence epidemic – the evil spread of white supremacy and domestic terrorism.”

Schumer said if the domestic terrorism prevention bill moves forward, there could be a debate on broader gun safety-related amendments.

“There is an additional benefit to moving forward today – it’s a chance to have a larger debate and consider amendments for gun safety legislation in general, not just for those motivated by racism as vital as it is to do that. I know that many members on the other side hold views that are different than the views on this side of the aisle so let us move on this bill, let us proceed, and then they can bring them to the floor,” he said.

But he acknowledged that Republicans are expected to block the bill from advancing.

Schumer outlined what he is willing to allow in terms of bipartisan efforts to reach a compromise on gun control – and what will happen if they fail.

“If Republicans obstruct debate today, we are prepared to have an honest and realistic discussion, conversation, negotiation for a little more time to see what they can come to the table with," he said. "We are under no illusions that this will be easy. We have been burned in the past when Republicans promised to debate only for them to break their promise. But even with long odds, the issue is so important, so raw to the American people, so personal to countless families with missing children, that we must pursue that opportunity.”

Schumer said Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy “has asked for space to see what progress can be done with Senate Republicans. Neither he nor I is under an illusion that this will be easy; it will not. But his view, my view and the overwhelming view of our caucus is we need to give it a short amount of time to try.”

Today would've been the last day of the school year for Robb Elementary

Students and their families at Uvalde's Robb Elementary should've been celebrating the last day of school today before the summer break.

Instead, they are mourning the deaths of 19 children and two teachers who were shot to death by an 18-year-old gunman. Others remain hospitalized from their injuries.

Parents of some of the victims said they saw their kids hours before the shooting on Tuesday, lauding them for making the honor roll or receiving awards at an end-of-year ceremony.

One mother said her son “couldn’t wait to go to middle school.”

Now their families will have to start planning funerals as questions remain around the investigation.

See how US gun culture compares to the world in 5 graphics

From CNN's Kara Fox, Krystina Shveda, Natalie Croker and Marco Chacon

Ubiquitous gun violence in the United States has left few places unscathed over the decades. Still, many Americans hold their right to bear arms, enshrined in the US Constitution, as sacrosanct. But critics of the Second Amendment say that right threatens another: The right to life.

America's relationship to gun ownership is unique, and its gun culture is a global outlier.

As the tally of gun-related deaths continue to grow daily,  here's a look  at how gun culture in the US compares to the rest of the world.

Read the  full story and see how CNN reported it here .

Here's what we know about the Uvalde school massacre — and what questions remain

From CNN's Adrienne Vogt and Tina Burnside

Authorities in Texas are working to "gather the facts" to establish a concrete timeline for the deadly shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Lt. Chris Olivarez told CNN on Thursday.

Here's what we know and what questions remain about the massacre:

School resource officer was armed

Olivarez told CNN's John Berman that officials are "trying to establish and corroborate exactly what was that role" for the school resource officer when he encountered the gunman at the school.

Texas Rangers conducted an interview last night with the school resource officer, Olivarez said. The officer was armed at the time of the shooting, he said, but it's unclear if he fired his weapon.

Yesterday, Texas Department of Public Safety Sgt. Erick Estrada said that the suspect dropped a bag full of ammunition outside of the school prior to entering.

School door was unlocked

The gunman was able to enter the school "unimpeded" by any locks, Olivarez said, and gunfire was exchanged inside the school hallway between the gunman and officers who were right behind him.

Those two officers were shot, and then the gunman barricaded himself inside a classroom, Olivarez said. Officials are still trying to determine exactly how he barricaded himself inside.

CNN previously reported that the gunman was on the school premises for up to an hour before law enforcement forcibly entered a classroom and killed him. 

When asked why it took tactical teams so long to respond to the shooting, Olivarez said that they are working to establish an accurate timeline, which is part of the investigation. 

"Right now, we do not have an accurate or a concrete timeline to provide to say 'the gunman was in the school for this period,' so we want want to obtain that factual information once we're able to attain that," the lieutenant said.

Parents seek answers

The father of a victim of the shooting told  The Washington Post  that he and other dads wanted to storm the elementary school to retrieve their children as they heard gunshots from inside. Video posted to social media appears to show frustrated and distraught parents and other adults outside the school clashing with law enforcement officers, urging the officers to go inside and get the gunman or let them go inside themselves.

"I can tell you right now, as a father myself, I would want to go in too. But it's a volatile situation. We have an active shooter situation. We're trying to preserve any further loss of life. ... We cannot have individuals going into that school, especially if they're not armed," Olivarez said.

FBI involvement

Olivarez also said local authorities are working with the FBI to obtain surveillance video from the school.

The FBI is also doing cell phone forensics for the gunman to "establish or obtain information from the suspect's phone, if there was any social media posts that was posted, any other facts that would help the case in terms of as far as there were any indicators for this shooter leading up to this mass shooting," he said.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn says he will meet with Connecticut Sen. Murphy today to discuss shooting

From CNN's Lauren Fox

Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn is back at the Capitol today after spending yesterday in Texas meeting with grieving families and officials. 

Cornyn recounted how “horrible” it was to see the community of Uvalde grieving. He also said that he is thinking through what could have been done or what could be changed to have stopped this shooting. He said this shooter was a “ticking time bomb” and troubled, but he said it is hard to know if enhanced background checks would have caught anything. 

He also said he is going to meet today with Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy to see what can be worked on. He said he and Murphy have met on and off for the last year on the issues around shootings and are going to try and resume some of their talks. 

He said he doesn’t know if they can reach an agreement on background checks or other bills, but he did say “this hopefully will provide a new, greater sense of urgency.”

Murphy has been a proponent of gun reform, particularly since the Sandy Hook school shooting in his state. After the Uvalde shooting, he gave a speech on the Senate floor and pleaded for his fellow lawmakers to take action.

Trauma surgeon treating shooting victims wipes away tears as she discusses "patients that we did not receive"

From CNN's Adrienne Vogt

Dr. Lillian Liao, pediatric trauma medical director at University Hospital in San Antonio, told CNN that her hospital is currently treating three children injured in the Uvalde school shooting .

"They are critical but stable and will be continuing to receive care over the next days to weeks," she said.

"Broadly speaking ... we were treating destructive wounds, and what that means is that there were large areas of tissue missing from the body, and they required emergency surgery because there was significant blood loss," Liao told CNN's John Berman.

Liao blinked back tears as she described receiving the injured children.

She said that her unit had experience treating mass shooting victims from the 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooting, and they were able to prepare quickly for the Uvalde shooting patients.

But she said the hardest part was knowing that many of victims were likely already dead.

"And also from the last experience we realized that when we're dealing with high-velocity firearm injuries, we may not get a whole lot of patients. I think that's what has hit us the most, not of the patients that we did receive and we are honored to treat them, but the patients that we did not receive. I think that that is the most challenging aspect of our job right now," she said, wiping away tears.

But, she added, "our job as the trauma center is to be focused on treating the patients that we did receive, and that's what we're going to do today." 

The hospital is also treating the gunman's grandmother, who officials say he shot in the face before fleeing their home and then getting into a crash near the school.

"She's critical but stable as well," Liao said.

Hear trauma surgeon here:

Parents say police held them back: "We wanted to get our babies out"

From CNN's Chris Boyette

The father of a school shooting victim in Uvalde, Texas, told The Washington Post that he and others wanted to storm the elementary school to retrieve their children as they heard gunshots from inside.

Javier Cazares said he arrived at Robb Elementary soon after hearing something was going on at his daughter’s school, and he told the Post he was joined near the building’s front door by several other men who had children at the school.

“There were five or six of [us] fathers, hearing the gunshots, and [police officers] were telling us to move back,” Cazares told the newspaper. “We didn’t care about us. We wanted to storm the building. We were saying, ‘Let’s go’ because that is how worried we were, and we wanted to get our babies out.”

The Washington Post reported that hours later, Cazares learned his daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, 9, had been shot and killed.

According to Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw, the gunman was in the school between 40 to 60 minutes before law enforcement forcibly entered and killed him.

Video posted to social media appears to show frustrated and distraught parents and other adults outside the school clashing with law enforcement officers, urging the officers to go inside and get the gunman or let them go inside themselves.

The gunman was in a standoff with law enforcement officers for about a half-hour after firing on students and teachers, Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican whose district includes Uvalde, told CNN’s Jake Tapper, citing a briefing he was given.

"And then [the shooting] stops, and he barricades himself in. That's where there's kind of a lull in the action," Gonzales said. "All of it, I understand, lasted about an hour, but this is where there's kind of a 30-minute lull. They feel as if they've got him barricaded in. The rest of the students in the school are now leaving."

Scene of mass shooting was "something I never want to see again," Uvalde justice of the peace says

Justice of the Peace Lalo Diaz said that when he was called to the scene of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde and told by officers that multiple children had been killed, his "heart dropped knowing that I was going to go in and have to assess a scene so horrific," he told CNN's John Berman outside the school on Thursday.

Because the county, which has less than 50,000 people, does not have a medical examiner, it was Diaz's job to process the dead.

When he went inside, he saw "something I never want to see again."

He recognized the body of Irma Garcia, a teacher at the school who had been a classmate of his.

Diaz attended the school, as did his children. He called it "a pillar of the community."

He said he never thought a mass shooting could occur in his town.

"We're a community of hunters, we see guns regularly, we see people loading up to go dove hunting or deer hunting, but never like this. Never to this caliber that you say we're going to have multiple homicides or whatever. Normally it happens in a case-by-case basis and it's rare. Never would I have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would have had to have gone and assess a site in that condition," he said.

Hear Uvalde justice of the peace here:

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Majority of American teachers worry about shootings at their schools, survey shows

This story was originally published by The 19th and is republished under a Creative Commons license . Sign up for The 19th’s newsletter here .

The majority of American K-12 public school teachers say they are at least somewhat worried about the possibility of a shooting at their school, according to a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.

Fifty-nine percent told Pew researchers that they were concerned about shootings on their campuses, with 18% saying they were “very” or “extremely” worried. Only 7% of teachers polled said they were not worried at all. School shootings reached a record high last year, with 83 separate incidents occurring in 2023.

Juliana Horowitz, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center, told The 19th that the genesis for this research came from doing preliminary interviews with educators before launching surveys on the state of teaching today. Many brought up concerns about gun violence and safety. “In asking about the day-to-day of being a teacher, I felt like this was a really important topic to capture,” Horowitz said.

Fears about campus safety have become widespread in the 25 years since two senior students opened fire on their classmates at Columbine High School in Colorado. They killed 12 students and one teacher.

Last year, roughly one in four American teachers reported experiencing a gun-related lockdown at their school. Fifteen percent of respondents said they went through one emergency lockdown, with another 8% saying that it happened where they teach more than once.

These numbers tell an important story, Horowitz said. “Especially for high school teachers, this is something that is really top of mind for them.”

High school teachers experience gun-related lockdowns more than any other demographic: 34% said they had at least one incident during the previous school year, compared to 22% of middle school teachers and 16% of elementary school teachers.

Approximately one-third of teachers who work in urban areas said they had a gun-related lockdown during the last school year, compared with 19% of those in suburban areas and 20% in rural ones.

Teachers in urban schools were the least likely to say that they felt adequately prepared by their school, with only 21% saying their school had done a good or excellent job, compared with 32% of teachers in suburban districts and 35% of teachers in rural ones.

Most of the surveyed teachers pointed at the role mental health care could play in addressing the gun violence crisis. A large majority — 69% — said they believed improving mental health screening and treatment for children and adults would be extremely or very effective in preventing school shootings. This emphasis on improving mental health held across party lines, with 73% of Democratic teachers and 66% of Republican teachers all saying that investment in mental health resources would be an extremely or very effective prevention tool.

Only 13% said that allowing teachers and administrators to carry guns in school would be extremely effective at curbing this form of gun violence.

Related: Amid clamor from protesters, Tennessee Senate passes bill to arm some teachers

Party affiliation had a lot to do with teachers’ opinions on how to be proactive about school safety. Sixty-nine percent of Republican teachers were in favor of having police officers or armed security in schools, compared with 37% of Democrats; 43% were in favor of metal detectors compared with only 27% of Democrats; and 28% were in favor of allowing teachers and administrators to carry guns, compared with just 3% of Democrats.

Horowitz said that teachers tend to lean Democratic, meaning that the majority of those surveyed are more likely to identify as Democrats than the public overall. “The results among Democratic teachers mirror more closely what we see overall among teachers — and so that’s why it’s really important to also look at these differences and see how Democratic and Republican teachers are reacting differently to these questions.”

She also points to the 3% of teachers who say that staff at their schools are allowed to carry guns. But that circumstance depends on the political leanings of the school district where the campus is located. Teachers in districts that went for President Donald Trump in 2020 saw this number reach 5%. In districts that went for President Joe Biden, it dropped to 1%. “I think that captures that partisan differences are important not just among teachers, but that there are partisan differences in terms of the sort of political environment where the schools are that they teach in,” Horowitz said.

For this study, Pew surveyed 2,531 members of RAND’s American Teacher Panel, which is nationally representative. Survey data was weighted to state and national teacher characteristics to account for differences in sampling and response.

Parents also echo teachers’ concerns, Horowitz added. A Pew Research Center study released last fall found that a third of American parents said they were extremely or very worried about a shooting at their child’s school, with an additional 37% saying they were somewhat worried. That means about seven in 10 parents have fears about school shootings.

This survey did not tie school shooting concerns to how teachers intend to vote in the November election. But Horowitz believes it is clear that issues affecting schools “are things that people will be talking about in the context of the election and politics.”

The ‘Youth Civic Hub,’ an online portal launched on Friday aims to increase youth civic engagement and electoral participation.

The board on Tuesday signaled to lawmakers that they want new laws to reform the state’s charter school system.

El distrito y la high school enfrentan una nueva audiencia con la Junta de Educación Estatal en mayo.

Un grupo influyente conservador ha elaborado una estrategia para desafiar una decisión histórica del Tribunal Supremo que protege el derecho de los niños indocumentados a asistir a la escuela pública.

With federal pandemic aid for schools expiring, the schools say the additional operating funding would be crucial for students and staff.

“I work in school nutrition to feed kids, not trash cans,” a dietitian testified at a legislative hearing last week.

What Teachers Think Might Prevent School Shootings

N ext month marks the two-year anniversary of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas , during which 19 elementary-school students and two teachers lost their lives, and 17 other people were shot. So far this year, there have been at least 50 shootings on school grounds, causing 16 deaths . So it's probably not surprising that more than half of public-school K-12 teachers in the U.S. are at least somewhat worried about a shooting in their place of work.

In a new survey by Pew Research Center , about a quarter of teachers report that their school had at least one gun-related lockdown in the last year, and 15% had more than one. Most of the teachers whose school had such a lockdown taught at high school level and in urban areas. Teachers in urban schools were also the most likely to say they felt their school had ill-prepared them for a shooting, and the least likely to say the school had an armed guard. Overall, about 60% of teachers are worried about a shooting at their own school and 7% are extremely worried.

Read More: It's Even Bleaker for Teachers Than You Thought

To some extent, teachers agree about what should be done to address the issue. On April 10, lawmakers in Tennessee, which lost three 9-year-olds to a school shooting in Nashville just over a year ago, passed a bill that allowed some staff to carry concealed weapons on school grounds. According to Pew, the overwhelming majority of teachers (70%) do not think that is the answer. (A RAND study taken last year found that more than half of teachers believed that carrying guns would actually make schools less safe.) A large proportion (69%), however, believe that improving mental-health screening and treatment for children and adults would help prevent shootings. About half think police officers or armed security guards would make a difference, and a third endorse metal detectors.

But a closer look at the findings from Pew suggests that teachers are divided along similar lines as the rest of America about how to solve the problem of guns in schools. While relatively few teachers, regardless of politics, believe it would be "extremely or very effective" if teachers and administrators carried guns, those who lean Republican are about nine times more likely than those who lean Democratic (28% to 3%) to think so. Only 37% on the Democrat side think having armed security staff would work well, while 69% on the Republican side do. And while close to half (43%) of GOP-aligned educators endorse metal detectors, only slightly more than a quarter (27%) of Dem respondents do.

These findings among teachers arrive as a subtle but detectable change in public perspective on who is responsible when a student fires a gun at school has begun to emerge. On April 9, it was revealed that a former assistant principal in Virginia, who allegedly did not heed warnings that a 6-year-old boy had brought a gun to school, had been indicted on charges of child abuse and neglect after that boy shot a teacher in 2023. That same day the parents of a school shooter in Michigan were sentenced to at least 10 years of prison time after they were convicted of involuntary manslaughter for failing to prevent their 15-year-old son from killing four of his schoolmates.

Tennessee parents who opposed their state's new legislation, including some of those whose children lived through the shooting in Nashville, expressed dismay at the new legislation. "As mothers of survivors, all we can do is continue to show up and keep sharing our stories and hope that eventually they will listen to them and take our advice," Melissa Alexander told The Tennessean . "We have real experiences in these tragedies. We are the ones who have been there, experienced this and lived through the aftermath of it." Beth Gebhard was even more blunt. "If what had happened on March 27 had gone down the way that it did with a teacher armed with a handgun attempting to put the perpetrator out," she said, "my children would likely be dead."

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Most Teachers Worry a Shooting Could Happen at Their School

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After years of efforts by administrators and policymakers to improve school safety, a majority of teachers are at least somewhat concerned about a shooting occurring at their school, and 7 percent say they are “extremely” worried.

That’s according to a Pew Research Center Survey of 2,531 U.S. public K-12 teachers released April 11, in which respondents identified improved mental health screening for children and adults as the top strategy to prevent shootings.

The findings of the nationally representative survey, conducted from Oct. 17 to Nov. 14, 2023, come as the nation approaches the 25-year commemoration of the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.—an event that changed conversations about school safety and helped fuel precautions like routine lockdown drills, which were conducted by 96 percent of public schools in the 2021-22 school year, according to the most recent federal data.

While mass school shootings are statistically rare events, their pace and scale have accelerated since the April 20, 1999 Columbine attack. Teachers’ responses demonstrate how much the fear of the worst-case scenario has shaped their experiences at work.

1. Teachers are concerned about a potential shooting at their school

Asked if they were concerned about a shooting occurring at their school, just 7 percent of respondents said “not at all.”

Educators, policymakers, and the public use varying criteria related to determine what is considered a school shooting; some limit their discussions to mass-casualty events that occur inside school buildings during school hours. But attacks at sporting events, during extracurricular activities, and in school parking lots can also create safety concerns, educators say.

There have been 10 school shootings in 2024 that resulted in injuries or deaths, according to an Education Week analysis. That count includes incidents during school-sponsored events and on school grounds, like a March 2 shooting outside of a high school basketball game in North Kansas City, Mo.

2. Many teachers say their schools could do more to prepare them for an active shooter

While a majority of respondents said their school has done at least a “good” job “providing them with the training and resources they need to deal with a potential active shooter in their school,” 39 percent said their school has done a “fair” or “poor job.”

Rural teachers were most likely to say their school had done an “excellent” or “very good” job preparing them, while teachers in urban schools were the least likely to agree with that statement.

While lawmakers’ calls to “harden schools” with physical security measures like metal detectors and armed school staff often get the most attention following a high-profile shooting, school safety experts have stressed prevention and preparing staff through procedures like basic lockdown drills.

3. Lockdowns disrupt school for students and teachers

While shootings are rare, the potential of a shooting causes regular disruptions for students and educators, who lock down classrooms as a precaution. Suspicious people near a school, reports of guns in classrooms, or threats can all prompt a lockdown.

Twenty-three percent of respondents to the Pew survey said their school went into lockdown at least once in the 2022-23 school year “because of a gun or suspicion of a gun on school property.” And 8 percent of teachers said their school had more than one gun-related lockdown.

Lockdowns were most common in high schools and in urban areas, teachers reported.

4. Teachers favor mental health support as a prevention strategy

Asked about a menu of strategies, respondents were most likely to say that “improving mental health screening and treatment for children and adults” would help prevent school shootings. Sixty-nine percent rated mental health as an “extremely” or “very” effective prevention strategy.

The survey did not specify who would be responsible for improved mental health supports. But many schools have sought to upgrade their counseling supports as they face a student mental health crisis. School-based mental health screenings have faced resistance from parents and policymakers concerned about student privacy, stigmatization, and possible civil rights violations if the results aren’t used properly.

Allowing teachers and administrators to carry guns was the least supported strategy, with just 13 percent of respondents agreeing it would be “extremely” or “very” effective.

Teachers’ support for prevention strategies varied based on political affiliation. The biggest difference based on political affiliation was in support of “having police officers or armed security stationed in schools.” Among respondents who identified as Democrat or “lean Democrat,” 37 percent said the strategy would be “extremely” or “very effective” at preventing school shootings, compared to 69 percent of self-identified Republican or “lean Republican” respondents.

Research suggests that , while school police do mitigate some types of violence in schools, their presence also correlates with increased student suspensions, expulsions, and arrests. There are also limited examples of school resource officers stopping school shootings, though advocates argue they may serve as a deterrent for would-be attackers.

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About 1 in 4 U.S. teachers say their school went into 'gun-related lockdown' last school year

About 1 in 4 U.S. teachers said their school went into a “gun-related lockdown” during the 2022-23 school year, according to new findings from the Pew Research Center .

The Pew Research Center surveyed about 2,500 teachers who are nationally representative of U.S. K-12 public school teachers on many different topics, including lockdowns prompted by guns, Associate Director Juliana Horowitz told NBC News.

"We do know from the conversations that we had leading up to developing the survey that in speaking about the challenges and concerns that they have in their day-to-day job as a teacher, this topic about being concerned about the possibility of a school shooting came up fairly frequently," Horowitz said. "And so that's one of the reasons that we thought it'd be important to put this topic on the survey to get a nationally representative read on how teachers are feeling on this."

The teachers told the research center they experienced lockdowns “because of a gun or suspicion of a gun at their school,” with around 15% saying it happened once during the year and 8% saying it happened more than once.

“High school teachers are most likely to report experiencing these lockdowns: 34% say their school went on at least one gun-related lockdown in the last school year,” according to the research center. “This compares with 22% of middle school teachers and 16% of elementary school teachers.”

In 2023, 15 people were killed and nine were injured by gunfire in eight school shootings, while in 2022, 29 people were killed and 29 were injured by gunfire in seven school shootings, according to NBC News’ school shooting tracker .

Urban school teachers (31%) were more likely to say their school had a lockdown that was gun-related than teachers at rural schools (20%) and suburban schools (19%), according to Pew.

Horowitz said while there are some differences across teachers who work in different types of schools and areas, a majority of teachers across the board say that they have at least some concern that a shooting can happen at their school.

About 59% of K-12 public school teachers said they were “at least somewhat worried” about a shooting happening at their school, with 18% saying they were “extremely or very worried,” the organization said. Around 31% of teachers were “not too worried” about school shootings, and 7% were “not at all worried.”

Almost 40% of teachers surveyed by the Pew Research Center said their school had done a fair or poor job preparing them to deal with a potential active shooter, while 30% said their schools did an excellent or very good job.

Most of the teachers (69%) said that “improving mental health screening and treatment” would be effective in preventing school shootings, while 13% said teachers and administrators carrying guns in school would be effective. Around 49% said having armed security in schools would be a big help, and 33% said the same about metal detectors.

Teachers’ political views came into play when they were asked about what could be done to prevent school shootings, with 69% of Republican-leaning teachers saying that having armed security in school would be helpful, as opposed to 37% of Democratic-leaning teachers. Having metal detectors in schools received support from 43% of Republican-leaning teachers, compared to 27% of Democratic-leaning teachers. Meanwhile, allowing teachers and administrators to carry guns in school received 28% Republican-leaning support and 3% Democratic-leaning support.

Pew conducted similar research among parents with K-12 age children in 2022, where it was determined 32% were "extremely or very worried" about a shooting happening at their child's school, while 37% were "somewhat worried." Similarly to the teachers, 63% of surveyed parents also said "improving mental health screening and treatment" would be very effective at preventing school shootings.

Breaking news reporter

We’ve had 25 years to learn it takes a village to raise a mass shooter

The circle of responsibility for youth gun violence is widening to include adults, a quarter-century after the columbine massacre made us consider it.

The conversation on a recent night turned to active shooter drills, because a few of our kids had just gone through one at each of their schools.

And even that sentence is a horrible thing to behold, the normalcy with which parents describe, between bites of pizza, the “i love u mom” texts their kids sent while cowering under a desk, the alerts from the school about a lockdown.

“I just can’t imagine anything worse than our kids getting hurt like that at school, ” one of my mom friends said.

“Well, maybe,” I posited, remembering the case of a 6-year-old boy in Virginia who took his mom’s gun to class and shot his teacher. “What if the shooter is your kid?”

This was the question searing every parent’s mind 25 years ago this month, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 people and themselves at Columbine High School.

America wondered how their parents didn’t see this coming. Didn’t they creep their rooms and journals? Couldn’t they tell this was more than anodyne teen angst? And wait — should I stop my kid from wearing a trench coat?

Maybe this national reckoning was what supercharged a generation of helicopter parents.

“I would gladly have given my life to reverse what happened that day and yet I know that nothing I can do or say could ever atone for Dylan’s choices, choices that I have spent decades trying to understand,” Sue Klebold, mother of Dylan, wrote on the website for her memoir.

That mother wrestled with her own dread and the cocked eyebrows of her fellow Americans. But the Columbine parents never had to pay, legally, for their sons’ crimes.

Twenty-five years and nearly 400 school shootings later, the circle of responsibility surrounding this American atrocity is finally widening.

This year, Michigan juries decided it takes a village to raise a mass shooter. After those decisions, a judge this week sentenced the parents of a teen who shot and killed four students at Oxford High School in 2021 to at least a decade in prison for their failure to prevent — heck, let’s be honest, and their part in enabling — this mass killing.

The road to the massacre began on Black Friday, when the Crumbleys bought their 15-year-old son, Ethan, a 9mm handgun as an early Christmas present. Four days later, he used it to kill.

His parents had been warned. After a teacher saw Ethan searching for ammo on his phone during class and alerted school officials, the school reached out to Ethan’s mom, Jennifer.

“LOL, I’m not mad at you,” Mom texted her son in response. “You have to learn not to get caught.”

These parents are no different from the getaway drivers in a bank robbery. And bravo to the jury that recognized that.

The courts in Virginia came to the same conclusion last year, slamming Deja Taylor with convictions on federal gun charges after her 6-year-old swiped a gun from her handbag and took it to school.

Virginia stretched that arc of accountability even further this week to include a school official in that case, who a grand jury concluded had failed to act on warnings about the boy and his behavioral problems. Two years before the shooting, he tried to choke another teacher.

And in the days before he fired the handgun, Taylor’s son broke his teacher’s cellphone after grabbing it from her and called her an expletive, with no substantial consequences.

In January 2023, with his classmates looking on, the child pulled his mom’s gun from his jacket pocket and shot Abigail Zwerner from less than six feet away.

“Ms. Zwerner looked down to see a pool of blood forming,” the special grand jury impaneled in Newport News wrote in the report it released this week. “The child continued to stare at her, not changing his emotional facial expression as he tried to shoot again.”

His size, ironically, saved lives that day. Seven bullets stayed in the magazine and 16 children were physically uninjured (though their mental scars from seeing the shooting may last a lifetime) because his weak pull on the trigger jammed the gun on the first shot, according to the grand jury report.

The signs of trouble were clear at school, the jurors decided, and they indicted the school’s assistant principal, Ebony Parker, on eight charges of child abuse. And that may be a legal precedent.

We’ve had hundreds of school shootings since the Columbine massacre reset our nation’s tolerance for gun-fueled bloodshed. It came and went, and no meaningful federal gun restrictions have taken hold in the decades since.

The biggest incidents sent us diving deep for answers and have provided a trail of warning signs and red flags that may seem confounding, but are nevertheless important to heed.

Eventually, patterns emerge after a quarter-century: easy access to guns, violent outbursts, warning signs such as deranged sketches and manifestos.

Ignoring those signs is negligent — criminally, now. And that’s exactly how it should be. The courts were right to convict the Crumbleys and Taylor. Parker’s indictment is an important message to send to school administrators who may be too quick to dismiss the messy process of discipline.

But we, too, are accountable, when we don’t insist on common-sense gun laws, when we reduce legitimate debate to T-shirt slogans and when we fail to respect machines whose only purpose is to kill with chilling efficiency. Some of this blood is on our hands.

It takes a village to stop mass shooters, too.

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