School Shootings in America: What the Numbers Actually Show

There is no single agreed-upon definition of a "school shooting." This is not a technicality. It is the reason you will see wildly different numbers depending on who is doing the counting, and it is the first thing you need to understand before looking at any statistic on this topic.

How the Numbers Are Counted

Four major sources track school shootings. Each uses a different definition and produces different numbers.

The K-12 School Shooting Database, maintained by the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Homeland Defense and Security, is the most comprehensive. It records every incident in which a gun is brandished, fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, at any time of day, on any day of the year. This includes after-hours incidents, accidental discharges, suicides, and shootings on school property that have nothing to do with students. By this definition, there were 346 incidents in 2023 and 293 in 2024.

Everytown for Gun Safety tracks incidents where a firearm discharges a live round inside a school building or on school grounds. This is narrower than the K-12 Database but still includes incidents outside school hours. Everytown recorded 176 incidents on school grounds in 2023.

Education Week tracks shootings at K-12 schools during school hours or at school-sponsored events that result in injuries or deaths. This is the definition closest to what most people picture when they hear "school shooting." Education Week recorded 37 incidents in 2023 and 38 in 2024.

The FBI's active shooter reports track individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. Only a subset of these occur at schools. The FBI identified 48 active shooter incidents across all locations in 2023.

The definitional gap matters. Someone citing "346 school shootings in 2023" and someone citing "37 school shootings in 2023" are both using real data. They are measuring different things.

The Trend Over Time

Regardless of which definition you use, every database shows the same directional trend: school shootings have increased.

Using the K-12 School Shooting Database (the longest-running comprehensive tracker):

The increase was gradual through the 2010s, accelerated around 2018, and spiked sharply after schools reopened from COVID-19 closures in 2021. The 2024 decline from the 2023 peak still leaves the number far above pre-2018 levels.

Education Week's narrower count shows a similar pattern. During the 2017-18 school year, they recorded 28 incidents with injuries or deaths during school hours. By the 2022-23 school year, that number had risen to 37. The 2023-24 school year saw 38.

The Deadliest Incidents

Mass casualty school shootings are the rarest category but receive by far the most public attention. These are the incidents that have shaped the national debate:

Virginia Tech (a university) and Sandy Hook (an elementary school) remain the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. The names of every person killed in these incidents are listed at the end of this article.

Each of these events triggered waves of public response: Columbine led to lockdown drills becoming standard. Sandy Hook prompted executive actions on gun policy. Parkland produced a student-led national movement (March for Our Lives). Uvalde raised questions about law enforcement response protocols after police waited over an hour before engaging the shooter while children called 911 from inside the classroom.

What the Typical School Shooting Looks Like

The mass casualty events dominate media coverage, but they are not representative of most school shootings. The majority of incidents tracked by any database are:

Interpersonal conflicts. The most common school shooting involves a dispute between specific individuals that escalates to gunfire. These are targeted, not indiscriminate. According to the Government Accountability Office, targeted violence between specific parties accounts for a majority of school shooting incidents.

Handguns, not rifles. While mass casualty events often involve semiautomatic rifles, the majority of school shootings involve handguns. This matches the broader pattern of gun violence in the U.S., where handguns account for the vast majority of all gun homicides.

Afterschool hours and weekends. The K-12 Database includes incidents at all times. A significant portion occur after hours, on weekends, or during summer when school property is being used for other purposes or is simply the location where a shooting happens to take place.

Lower casualty counts. Most school shooting incidents result in zero or one fatality. The median is far below the mass casualty events that drive headlines.

Who Is Affected

School shootings do not affect all communities equally.

According to the GAO's 2020 report, schools with higher proportions of students of color and students from low-income families experience a disproportionate share of school shooting incidents. This pattern holds across multiple databases and definitions.

Everytown's analysis found that between 2013 and 2023, schools where the majority of students were Black experienced gunfire at a rate roughly four times higher than schools where the majority of students were white.

This disparity receives relatively little attention in national media, which disproportionately covers mass casualty events at suburban and predominantly white schools. The result is a public perception of school shootings that does not match the statistical reality of where they most frequently occur.

The International Comparison

School shootings are not unique to the United States, but their frequency is. A CNN analysis comparing data across countries found that between 2009 and 2018, the U.S. experienced 57 times as many school shootings as all other G7 nations combined.

Countries that have experienced mass school shootings have generally responded with sweeping policy changes:

• United Kingdom (Dunblane, 1996, 17 killed): Banned private ownership of handguns.
• Australia (Port Arthur, 1996, 35 killed at a historic site, not a school): Implemented the National Firearms Agreement, including a mandatory buyback of semiautomatic weapons. Australia has had no mass shootings (using the pre-1996 definition) in the decades since.
• Germany (Erfurt, 2002, 16 killed; Winnenden, 2009, 15 killed): Raised the minimum age for large-caliber weapons, strengthened storage requirements, and increased monitoring of gun owners.

Whether these international examples are applicable to the U.S. context is debated. The U.S. has a constitutionally protected individual right to bear arms (established in Heller, 2008), a vastly larger existing stock of civilian firearms (393 million), and a different political structure that makes national gun legislation extremely difficult to pass. These are real constraints, not excuses.

What Has Been Done

Federal Level

Despite the increase in school shootings, Congress has passed only one significant gun bill in the past two decades: the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (2022), signed after Uvalde. It:

• Enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21
• Provided funding for state crisis intervention programs (red flag laws)
• Closed the "boyfriend loophole" for domestic violence convictions
• Funded school mental health programs and security improvements

It did not ban any weapons, raise the minimum purchase age nationally, or require universal background checks. It was the most significant federal gun safety legislation since the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban.

State Level

States have moved in opposite directions. Since 2018:

States adding restrictions: Red flag laws (now in 22 states plus D.C.), assault weapon bans (10 states), waiting periods, safe storage laws, and raised purchase ages.

States removing restrictions: Permitless carry (now legal in 29 states), armed teacher programs, and preemption laws preventing cities from passing their own gun ordinances.

The result is a patchwork where the gun laws a student lives under depend almost entirely on which state they are in.

School-Level Response

Schools have responded with:

• Lockdown drills: Now standard in virtually all U.S. schools. A 2020 survey found that 95% of public schools had a written active shooter plan.
• School resource officers (SROs): Armed police assigned to schools. Approximately 58% of public schools had a sworn law enforcement officer present at least once a week during the 2021-22 school year.
• Physical hardening: Bulletproof glass, metal detectors, controlled entry points, and surveillance cameras. The school security industry generates an estimated $3.1 billion annually.
• Threat assessment programs: Behavioral monitoring systems designed to identify potential threats before they materialize.

The effectiveness of these measures is debated. Lockdown drills are standard but their impact on outcomes during actual events is difficult to measure. SROs were present at Parkland and Uvalde; in both cases, the armed officers did not stop the shootings. Metal detectors can prevent weapons from entering a building but are costly and create bottleneck entry points.

What the Data Cannot Settle

The school shooting debate involves several questions that data alone cannot resolve:

Is the right to bear arms worth the cost? This is ultimately a values question. The data can tell you how many people die from gun violence and how that compares to other countries. It cannot tell you whether those deaths are an acceptable price for the constitutional right to own firearms. Different people weigh these things differently, and both positions are held in good faith.

Would specific policies reduce school shootings? Causal claims are hard to prove. International comparisons suggest that reducing gun availability reduces gun deaths. But the U.S. has a unique combination of constitutional protections, existing gun stock, and political structure that makes direct comparison difficult. State-level data shows some correlation between stricter gun laws and lower gun death rates, but isolating cause and effect across states with different demographics, cultures, and enforcement levels is methodologically challenging.

Are school shootings the right frame for gun policy? School shootings represent a small fraction of total gun deaths. In 2023, Education Week recorded 37 school shootings with injuries or deaths. That same year, there were over 46,000 total gun deaths. Policies designed specifically around school shootings (hardened schools, armed teachers, age restrictions for certain weapons) address only a narrow slice of the problem. Policies addressing gun deaths broadly (universal background checks, red flag laws, suicide prevention) would affect more people but are harder to pass because they regulate gun ownership generally, not just in the context of schools.

The Numbers Are Not the Argument

Data does not make policy decisions. People do. The same data set can support arguments for more gun regulation or for more armed security in schools, depending on which data points you emphasize and what values you bring to the question.

What the data does show clearly: school shootings in America are not rare, they are not declining, and the U.S. is an outlier among wealthy democracies. These are facts. What to do about them is the argument the country has been having for 25 years, and it is no closer to resolution than it was when Columbine happened more than a quarter century ago.

The Names

The statistics in this article represent people. These are the 122 victims killed in the seven deadliest school shootings in the United States.

Columbine High School, Littleton, CO (April 20, 1999). 13 killed. Cassie Bernall, 17. Steven Curnow, 14. Corey DePooter, 17. Kelly Fleming, 16. Matthew Kechter, 16. Daniel Mauser, 15. Daniel Rohrbough, 15. Rachel Scott, 17. Isaiah Shoels, 18. John Tomlin, 16. Lauren Townsend, 18. Kyle Velasquez, 16. Dave Sanders, 47.

Red Lake High School, Red Lake, MN (March 21, 2005). 7 killed. Derrick Brun, 28. Neva Rogers, 62. Alicia White, 14. Dewayne Lewis, 15. Chase Lussier, 15. Chanelle Rosebear, 15. Thurlene Stillday, 15.

Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA (April 16, 2007). 32 killed. Ross Alameddine, 20. Jamie Bishop, 35. Brian Bluhm, 25. Ryan Clark, 22. Austin Cloyd, 18. Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, 49. Kevin Granata, 45. Matthew Gwaltney, 24. Caitlin Hammaren, 19. Jeremy Herbstritt, 27. Rachael Hill, 18. Emily Hilscher, 19. Jarrett Lane, 22. Matthew La Porte, 20. Henry Lee, 20. Liviu Librescu, 76. Partahi Lumbantoruan, 34. Lauren McCain, 20. Daniel O'Neil, 22. Juan Ortiz-Ortiz, 26. Minal Panchal, 26. Daniel Perez Cueva, 21. Erin Peterson, 18. Michael Pohle Jr., 23. Julia Pryde, 23. Mary Read, 19. Reema Samaha, 18. Waleed Shaalan, 32. Leslie Sherman, 20. Maxine Turner, 22. Nicole White, 20. G.V. Loganathan, 53.

Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, CT (December 14, 2012). 26 killed. Charlotte Bacon, 6. Daniel Barden, 7. Olivia Engel, 6. Josephine Gay, 7. Dylan Hockley, 6. Madeleine Hsu, 6. Catherine Hubbard, 6. Chase Kowalski, 7. Jesse Lewis, 6. Ana Marquez-Greene, 6. James Mattioli, 6. Grace McDonnell, 7. Emilie Parker, 6. Jack Pinto, 6. Noah Pozner, 6. Caroline Previdi, 6. Jessica Rekos, 6. Avielle Richman, 6. Benjamin Wheeler, 6. Allison Wyatt, 6. Rachel D'Avino, 29. Dawn Hochsprung, 47. Anne Marie Murphy, 52. Lauren Rousseau, 30. Mary Sherlach, 56. Victoria Soto, 27.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, FL (February 14, 2018). 17 killed. Alyssa Alhadeff, 14. Martin Duque Anguiano, 14. Nicholas Dworet, 17. Jaime Guttenberg, 14. Luke Hoyer, 15. Cara Loughran, 14. Gina Montalto, 14. Joaquin Oliver, 17. Alaina Petty, 14. Meadow Pollack, 18. Helena Ramsay, 17. Alex Schachter, 14. Carmen Schentrup, 16. Peter Wang, 15. Scott Beigel, 35. Aaron Feis, 37. Chris Hixon, 49.

Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, TX (May 24, 2022). 21 killed. Nevaeh Bravo, 10. Jacklyn Cazares, 9. Makenna Lee Elrod, 10. Jose Flores Jr., 10. Eliahna Garcia, 9. Uziyah Garcia, 10. Amerie Jo Garza, 10. Xavier Lopez, 10. Jayce Luevanos, 10. Tess Mata, 10. Maranda Mathis, 11. Alithia Ramirez, 10. Annabell Rodriguez, 10. Maite Rodriguez, 10. Alexandria Rubio, 10. Layla Salazar, 11. Jailah Silguero, 10. Eliahna Cruz Torres, 10. Rojelio Torres, 10. Irma Garcia, 48. Eva Mireles, 44.

The Covenant School, Nashville, TN (March 27, 2023). 6 killed. Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9. William Kinney, 9. Hallie Scruggs, 9. Cynthia Peak, 61. Mike Hill, 61. Katherine Koonce, 60.