How Many School Shootings? All Incidents from 1966-Present
81 comments
·February 23, 2025jjmarr
A homeless guy shot another homeless guy on my university campus a few weeks ago. It's hard to consider that a school shooting even though it happened on-campus.
DeathRay2K
As a measure of the safety of schools, it seems perfectly reasonable to consider that a school shooting.
seabird
Calling a crime-related shooting in the parking lot of a school at 1am on a Saturday a school shooting is not what most people are discussing when talking about school shootings.
wtallis
If you're going to count shootings at universities as school shootings, then it's reasonable to include shootings that happen over the weekend, because they still have students around on the weekends and at night.
thih9
I find it shocking that there can be different types of school shootings - and that there is time to discuss their classification.
motorest
> Calling a crime-related shooting in the parking lot of a school at 1am on a Saturday a school shooting is not what most people are discussing when talking about school shootings.
Aren't you getting it entirely backwards, though? You're faced with a crisp definition of what a school shooting is, and you're somehow invested in arguing that a shooting taking place at a school isn't a school shooting because of your own arbitrary criteria.
Arguing whether a shooting should be considered a school shooting or not feels like you're completely missing the whole point that there are shootings taking place at schools, which I would imagine would be very concerning.
Dylan16807
I'm more inclined to count students fighting off-campus about classroom grudges than to count non-students fighting on-campus.
And the idea of counting both doesn't seem right to me.
Though I'm not sure how my expectations align, in particular when I hear "school shooting" my first expectation is that there are multiple targets, not just one person. And it's hard for me to react to this data unless I know what percentage are single-target and what percentage are multi-target.
bradhe
When data challenges people’s’ world view they find crafty ways to split hairs.
grandempire
The only reason to "consider" it is because you want people to imagine a Columbine-like event.
makeitdouble
The impressive part is that kind of thing just naturally happens, and the discussion comes around whether it fits the school shooting framing or not.
feliciousx
yeah, i can’t imagine raising my kid in an environment where they could actually die from a gunshot. i don’t understand how this is so normalised in a first world country
anigbrowl
You probably would if you'd been in the immediate vicinity. Being shot at (even inadvertently) has a way of changing your persective.
Dylan16807
Getting scared enough to change your perspective sounds like a reason to specifically not expect the people involved to be objective or correctly categorize the event.
suraci
wtf
people are homeless
homeless guys in a school
a homeless guy in a school with a gun
a homeless guy shot another in a school
and all you care is if it's a school shooting???
wtf
am i the only one who think all of these listed above are unacceptable???
827a
What are you doing, personally, to improve any of those things (beyond just wasting time on the internet)?
motorest
> What are you doing, personally, to improve any of those things (beyond just wasting time on the internet)?
Pretending it's not a problem is a good start. From the looks of this thread, that seems to be a low-hanging fruit that's already out of reach for some.
Also, resorting to ad-hominem arguments is a show of bad faith. Your random person on the street has absolutely no influence on how someone has access to a gun.
ccppurcell
Maybe they don't live in America. I have paid taxes in countries with good social safety nets for example, which helps alleviate homelessness.
suraci
well, that's a good question
I'm afraid there's nothing i can do to improve this
the only thing i can do is trying to avoid rationalizing it
there are so many things like this that I'm incapable of changing
decremental
[dead]
motorest
> A homeless guy shot another homeless guy on my university campus a few weeks ago. It's hard to consider that a school shooting even though it happened on-campus.
You find it hard to consider a school shooting a shooting taking place at a school?
827a
Depends on how the data is used.
Also if you've ever been to a school like NYU, you'd naturally ask: Where does the school start and end?
motorest
> Depends on how the data is used.
How can you misuse data on school shootings?
Let's go a different way. Say you arrive home and you hear that there was a shooting at a school. What can possibly lead you to argue "oh that doesn't count, because X" ?
> Also if you've ever been to a school like NYU, you'd naturally ask: Where does the school start and end?
Why do you believe this is any relevant? I mean, to start off can you point out which incident fits your hypothetical scenario?
decremental
[dead]
throwaway529
Someone with a gun o campus and able and willing to kill another, and shoots them?
m4r1k
Absurd that 2021-2024 saw massively more shootings than 1966-2020 combined. Clearly it’s getting out of hands. What’s the reason behind this huge rise?
chneu
Without any research I'd wager mental health among teens and young adults is very bad.
They don't really have a future. At least not a fun one to look forward to.
shipp02
How have 40% of the perpetrators escaped? Seems a little high given how sensitive of a subject school shootings are.
seabird
If somebody got into with somebody else after the high school football game and popped a few off before running away and nobody snitched, they're not going to find them.
Take note of the "parking lot" and "escalation of dispute" data points.
motorest
> How have 40% of the perpetrators escaped? Seems a little high given how sensitive of a subject school shootings are.
What's the success rate of catching any random shooter?
CobrastanJorji
Interesting that 2% of school shooters are the school's police officer. I guess that's not surprising, since they're presumably the only person who'd regularly have a gun on campus.
what
Because this DB doesn’t just consist of what most people would consider a school shooting, but likely includes any discharge of a firearm on school property.
motorest
> Because this DB doesn’t just consist of what most people would consider a school shooting, but likely includes any discharge of a firearm on school property.
And that's perfectly fine. That's exactly the problem that concerns people. No one is saying "well my kid got shot but thankfully it was by the police/security guard and not a rando".
CobrastanJorji
I haven't seen the raw data (and I'm surprised they require you to request it), but since 280 or so of the incidents are "accident," and since police officers have guns, I imagine a good chunk of that 2% would be police officers accidentally firing their guns.
null
anonnon
Note that the surge in school shootings is despite a marginal secular decline in household gun ownership: https://www.vpc.org/studies/ownership.pdf
mgarfias
are they still counting a pair of gang bangers shooting each other in the parking lot a school shooting?
jebarker
Because that's totally fine and in no way suggests guns are problematic.
seabird
Yes.
>The definition used for the K-12 SSDB is: a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims (including zero), time, day of the week, or reason.
ikawe
Counting yes, but the charts in the article show that the largest group of shooters is students. About 1/3 are unrelated to the school or have an “unknown” relationship .
It’s a short list of charts - worth a quick scroll through if you didn’t already.
what
Why can’t a gangbanger also be a student?
motorest
> are they still counting a pair of gang bangers shooting each other in the parking lot a school shooting?
Do you think that shootings at school are not school shootings?
timeon
It is much easier for gangs to obtain guns in country where guns are so accessible.
cancerhacker
[flagged]
Dylan16807
> preconceived racist notions of the data
Is "gang banger" automatically racist? And even if it is, saying that data should be excluded doesn't sound like it's playing into any stereotypes.
And when they criticize the previous data collection, that's not "preconceived", it's a real observation.
tough
plenty of very white nazi gang members on those bands
anonnon
I understand it's an emotional topic, but the article is just dry data, and flagging it (along with half the comments in this thread) was unnecessary. I wouldn't even care that much if it weren't for the fact that HN clearly penalizes accounts based on how their submissions and comments are flagged by other users. @dang could you please unflag it?
anonnon
BTW the point of my submission was to highlight the anomaly that the number of school shootings (and victims) is paradoxically surging despite gun ownership declining and murder rates--while spiking after 2020--still being well-below historic highs: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/briefing/murder-rate.html
everyone
Is this globally or in one specific country though? It doesnt say anywhere on the page as far as I can see.
riffraff
It's in the USA, you can see the tableau data showing the states and such.
Also school shootings are not really a thing outside the US, e.g. there's been a handful in Europe in this decade.
ein0p
I wonder why the school shootings went up so much under Biden, and why we heard so little about it.
alienchow
COVID. People in semi house arrest mode deprived of social interaction forgot how to be decent human beings. Shortly after I left the US, I vividly recall reading the news about a 6yo shot dead in his mum's car by a road rager on the freeway, and wondered why I ever stayed in the US for so long. Dodging the Gilroy garlic festival shooting because I took over Sunday on-call for a teammate should've been the first sign.
JKCalhoun
Guessing because, post COVID, school was back on again.
School shootings are down during summer too.
Depressing.
sahila
School being back on isn't a satisfactory answer to why there's a such a large increase. It went from 124 in 2019 to 349 in 2023, nearly 3x as many shootings.
I don't know the answer but I would guess it's either Covid's social isolation effects on people, more societal stress with high inflation, an impending recession, and unknown job future for many, or Tiktok/social media becoming a bigger part of our lives.
pastor_williams
My assumption was that something about the reporting changed. But I also don't know the answer.
petemill
Looks more like the rate of increase started going up in 2018
duxup
Is this something the federal government even has any ability to control?
ein0p
The federal government can control what constitutes a school shooting, for example, in order to push anti-2A agenda. Idk if that's what happened here, hence the question.
srcoder
> I wonder why the school shootings went up so much under Biden, and why we heard so little about it.
I think it's shootings in general [1] went up last couple of years. Could it be that there is just more awareness last couple of years so the recorded listings will up?
I would say, any shooting is one too many. I don't life in the US but I think it has nothing todo with politics.
Mistletoe
I think it’s more that the world lost its collective mind after Covid in 2020.
null
readthenotes1
I also noticed my hatred of morning is justified.
The surge the last 4 years is interesting, but in order to know if it's Biden or just "the kids are not alright", we'll have to wait...
gddgb
[flagged]
> All shootings at schools includes when a gun is fired, brandished with intent to harm, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time, or day of the week.
This definition is broad enough to encompass e.g. someone barricading themselves in an apartment a few blocks away with a 5.57 rifle and shooting at the police; this happened at my daughter's HS, and a bullet did land on the campus just because the campus is large and was in the same general direction.
It also seems like it would be broad enough to include a police officer drawing their duty weapon on a student threatening another student with a knife (also happened at my daughter's HS), but I'm less sure about that.
Neither of those would be considered "school shootings" by the vast majority of the population.