How Many School Shootings? All Incidents from 1966-Present | Hacker News Reader

How Many School Shootings? All Incidents from 1966-Present

k12ssdb.org

100 points_zagj119 comments

> 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.

> This definition is broad enough to encompass (...)

And that's perfectly fine. This criteria covers all conceivable scenarios where a kid going to school can be shot. Isn't that the whole point?

When people talk about "stopping school shootings" they don't tend to want to substitute a student with a knife getting arrested at gunpoint with that student stabbing another student.

this may be a bit unfair. stopping school shootings by any sane argument is ALWAYS about gun control.

as an exercise - take any definition of a school shooting you desire. then compare USA with any country on the planet of your choosing (you can even pick random geographical area spanning random number of countries) and see whether the childhood our children are subjected to are comparable. we have failed and are continuing to fail our children, regardless of how you choose to define what school shooting

Even conceding that point, if I were to say something absurd like "There were sixteen-quadrillion school shootings in the US last year" and someone pushes back on that, I can't just fall back on "well there were a lot" and absolve myself of rhetorical malpractice.

our public discourse currently is a lot of what we are talking about here - let's try to "define" what school shooting is. to me, as far as that goes (as I mentioned, regardless of the definition of it) we are not 3rd but 4th World Country

The whole point seems to be to cast as wide a net as possible for the definition as so to claim a higher number of "school shootings" than the majority agreed definition suggests.

Makes me wonder what motive people could have to do this.

I wonder if your wondering is rhetorical? There is a pretty obvious candidate.

It was.

So instead of addressing the elephant in the room, we talk about grammar and imaginary situations. No wonder things will never get fixed.

The elephant in this room is that the "school shooting" numbers are being inflated.

People say "oh America is so bad it has so many school shootings" then you look at what counts as a school shooting and it's stuff that poses no danger to students and may not have even happened at a school.

I don't think most Americans or non-Americans really pay too much attention to school shootings one way or another. But when they see semi-regular news of shootings at schools resulting in large amounts of children being slain they're inclined to think something is wrong in the US. And when it comes to the pervasiveness of US gun culture and how easy it is to get tooled up over there, they're not wrong. Regardless of implied stat inflation, the US is still the undisputed school shooting champion of the world.

> But when they see semi-regular news of shootings at schools resulting in large amounts of children being slain...

But they don't. Look at the history e.g. on Wikipedia [0]. It tracks school shootings with >= 4 victims in the last 300 years.

To call 10 times in the last 10 years semi-regular is a stretch. Most of those didn't make it into the public consciousness. People will remember Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Columbine, but those were 12, 18, and 26 years ago.

To call them large numbers of slain is a stretch, that Wikipedia article is events >= 4 deaths. Those 4 include perpetrators, the number of innocent victims is lower.

To call them children is a stretch, because a lot of the victims are adults/employees/shooters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

This is still arguing about semantics. Switzerland, the poster child argument of gun culture enthusiasts saying "but also they all have guns" had zero such events, whichever way you choose to define them, above or below 4 killed persons. And nobody cares about the exact number anyway outside the "nah we're fine" group, indeed they just want it safer.

> Switzerland, the poster child argument of gun culture enthusiasts saying "but also they all have guns" had zero such events

America has 38 times the population of Switzerland. If Switzerland was equally as dangerous you'd expect them to have 1/38th the events. That Wikipedia page lists 35 events. How many would we expect Switzerland to have? A bit less than 1, so either 1 or 0. That matches the observed data.

> And nobody cares about the exact number anyway outside the "nah we're fine" group, indeed they just want it safer.

Maybe they should. The chance for any student in America being killed in a school shooting is something like 1 in 10,000,000. That's around the chance of being killed by lightning. Not struck by lightning - that's a 10x more common 1 in 1,000,000 - but struck and killed by lightning.

How much effort to people put into not being killed by lightning? Not much other than knowing 'don't go outside in a thunderstorm'. The risk of school shootings should give students equal alarm.

> imaginary situations

Neither situation was hypothetical; they both happened at my daughter's High School. Anecdotal certainly, but not imaginary. Certainly nobody says "There have been two school shootings at that HS in the past few years"

> Certainly nobody says "There have been two school shootings at that HS in the past few years"

In most countries nobody says that about any school.

The term should be changed to "school massacre". I think that would cleanly narrow the definition in a way that is compatible with common usage.

Speaking of which, I don't understand why that term fell out of favor. Like we already have a term for "mass shooting". It's not called the "Boston Mass Shooting".

But then you'd have to include things like bombings and maybe bomb threats. And that might re-focus attention away from the chosen tools and towards the people doing it, which would make it less useful for election season.

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 probably would if you'd been in the immediate vicinity. Being shot at (even inadvertently) has a way of changing your persective.

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.

IF there are people involved in a situation where there's a risk of death, that's an objective fact. There is no 'correct classification' issue here. The article collects all shootings that happen on school properties, you can derive subcategories from that. On the other hand, if your selection criteria is, say, 'shootings where someone tries to kill as many students/teachers as possible' you'll omit a lot of very real shooting incidents. It's better to have more data than less.

That has almost nothing to do with what I said.

But to address your new points, I think very broad collection is fine as long as people don't treat the raw entry count as a particularly useful number.

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.

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

Is there some place where it is not possible to be shot? Even space is not safe, Russia brought guns with them.

This could be one of the most difficult part to appropriately convey with words.

There are guns everywhere, in every country. In the most peaceful places there will be some portion of cops allowed to wear guns, there will be hunters with permits etc. There will always be a non-zero chance to be shot.

But whether that non-zero chance is 0.00001% or 1% makes a world of difference and will have deep impacts on how we live our life, talk to people, deal with confrontations.

A low enough probability brings radical changes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

Funnily enough, this was at Toronto Metropolitan University. We have a safe injection site on campus because it's downtown.

As a measure of the safety of schools, it seems perfectly reasonable to consider that a school shooting.

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.

I find it shocking that there can be different types of school shootings - and that there is time to discuss their classification.

You're being obtuse. Assuming GP is stating the truth and it happened in a school's parking lot in the middle of the night, then the entire location is incidental and not meaningful in the least.

It's simply not helpful to group them with the shootings that happen during school hours and target students/staff.

> You're being obtuse.

No, not really. Think about it: who is somehow trying to argue away school shootings based on arbitrary assertions? Do you think you can argue away the gun violence out of school grounds?

I would dare say that gun violence is bad all around, but here we are, trying to argue that some episodes should not count because of reasons. That would certainly reassure those attending those schools, as well as their family and communities.

Arguing that gun violence is bad all round is fine. But this isn't that? It's exploiting the special emotive value of the term "school shooting" - something that will obviously be read to refer to a specific kind of circumstance that everyone understands - in an attempt to colour as many possible instances of gun violence with the seriousness with which the authors think they should be regarded. Or so it seems to me.

> a specific kind of circumstances that everyone understands

Citation needed.

I assume your absolutist definition would only include incidents where a child made contact with and suffered harm from a fired bullet?

Asserting that gun violence can be regarded as less serious because it was not a “school shooting” feels seriously sick to me.

It's not that it's less serious, it's that it comes from a different circumstance and affects demographics that many gun control advocates don't actually have any interest in helping.

That could be motivation if one doesn't mind absurdity, like “gun control yes, but you're exempt if you pinky-promise you only shoot <people-I-don't-like>”.

I really don't know what you're trying to say. Is the implication that I don't care about the impoverished black kid that has to grow up in a world with highly prevalent incidental crime-related gun violence? If that's what you're getting at, please re-read my previous comment.

This data was compiled with the criteria it was to inflate the perceived number of "muh assault rifle" headliner-style school shootings. You're probably never going to turn on national news and see any reporting on any of these crime disputes that came to a head at/near a school. There is very little political willpower to do anything about these instances and not calling this shit out for what it is is a disservice to the people that are actually impacted by this strain of gun violence.

EDIT: after re-reading your comment a few more times, I think what you were trying to say is that it doesn't make sense that people would overlook some gun violence and worry more about other instances, but I've got bad news for you -- they do it all the fucking time. It's not that it's <people-they-don't-like>, it's <people-they-don't-think-about-at-all>, save when they make for a convenient data point.

My comment wasn't meant as an attack on you, on the contrary. I think we agree on your points. I find it absurd that one can be pro gun control but then be selective about what kind of gun violence it's meant to reduce.

> 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.

I wasn't reading anything into it at all. I'm just saying that the vast majority of people wouldn't consider it a school shooting. They're almost always talking about an active shooter targeting students.

If you want my two cents: no shit gun violence is bad. It's just that that type of gun violence doesn't impact suburban whites, and it's incredibly disingenuous to have so much gnashing of teeth over the overall number when most people passionately talking about this only care about a certain subset of that number.

Those after-hours shootings-at-schools are part of a larger pattern of gun violence that advocates of gun control have basically never made a focus of.

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.

I used to get back from band trips (competitions, away games) in the middle of the night. The buses would drop us off at school where our parents would be waiting to pick us up (the upperclassmen could drive themselves.)

It would have been rather disappointing to get hit by a stray bullet then, and know that it wasn’t considered as important as a daylight incident.

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.

The only reason to "consider" it is because you want people to imagine a Columbine-like event.

What’s the threshold for number of dead children to be considered a Columbine?

In the case describing in this sub thread there are zero children involved.

Good idea. Let’s start by requiring at least one child to be shooting or shot at.

What do you think it does to child, to know that there was violence at their school, but they lucked out by not being around when it happens?

Do you think that’s conducive to their education? To their mental well-being?

Good idea. Incarcerate violent homeless fighting in the parking lot. We can’t have school around that.

Note that the presence of vagrants and other violent criminals is orthogonal to schools or children having access to firearms.

Any reasonable person will agree that violence on school property after school hours without student involvement is different than violence between students.

The only reason you want to say they are the same is you want to borrow that public sentiment against the horror of school shootings like Columbine.

You and I both know that if the public was explained the details of each event classified as a “school shooting” they would not have the same reaction.

I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or how many levels of irony you’re on here.

I don’t think you’re using “orthogonal” correctly. And the continual use of the ad populum fallacy doesn’t help your argument.

It doesn't look sarcastic to me. They are arguing that two random people fighting in the parking lot should be arrested but not treated like a columbine. That makes a lot of sense to me. It doesn't make sense to you?

The phrasing only sounds weird because you were (baselessly) implying they didn't care about that violence, so they had to directly state that they care in a super obvious way.

Their actual comment used the phrase

  "is orthogonal to schools or children having access to firearms."

which drained the sense and reason from their position.

Homeless vargrants gunfighting in the school carpark after dark will factually increase the odds of the first children the next day finding a scattered firearm with live ammunition from ZERO chance to SOME chance.

This negates the assertion of orthogonality.

Regardless, my only other comment to this submission still stands; it doesn't matter whether non student shootings on school grounds are included or not in country by country comparisons .. the USofA still "wins" a very hollow victory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43155165

I think their argument is that a child is far more likely to get a gun by other means. Let's say 90% orthogonal instead of 100%.

Does it make sense in that light?

> it doesn't matter whether non student shootings on school grounds are included or not in country by country comparisons

Sure. But I think we should strive toward accurate categorization in reporting.

Sure.

The US has a lot of gun play within school boundaries. Most of that (see pie chart) involves students. Some of it doesn't.

Other countries have near zero gun play on school grounds.

That appears accurate.

When data challenges people’s’ world view they find crafty ways to split hairs.

> 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?

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?

> 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?

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???

What are you doing, personally, to improve any of those things (beyond just wasting time on the internet)?

Maybe they don't live in America. I have paid taxes in countries with good social safety nets for example, which helps alleviate homelessness.

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

> 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.

As the original commenter, I live in Toronto, Canada. It's pretty simple: homes are too expensive. One bedroom in an illegal sublet of an eighth of a house can be C$1000+/month. Why would anyone pay money to live in a de facto homeless shelter when one can be homeless for free?

If we want to fix this, we need to build more supply. The system we have now has too much regulation and permitting designed to block development, so the only stuff that gets built is single family luxury housing or extremely large multifamily apartment complexes.

Note that the surge in school shootings is despite a marginal secular decline in household gun ownership: https://www.vpc.org/studies/ownership.pdf

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?

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.

No one knows for sure, but if I take the perspective of a socially alienated young person who is angry, resentful, and feels a growing desire for revenge, I would say hours of screen time, social media dynamics [1], and widespread economic insecurities only worsen the situation. It is easy to become resentful and aggressive when you are isolated and feel left behind. Additionally, it is much easier to become radicalized as an isolated individual online. I believe that in the last century, it was more difficult to become radicalized from your own bedroom, and people had more social interactions, even if they weren't actively seeking them out.

[1] Anxiety surges in GenZ around its introduction: https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/

I suspect the copycat effect is a large part of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting_contagion

The media has historically, starting with Columbine, been extremely irresponsible when it comes to school shootings, showing little of the discretion that it does when it comes to youth suicide (for which they've adopted professional standards informed by CDC, WHO, etc. recommendations: https://afsp.org/ethicalreporting/), to the point that it's given perpetrators fame that's endured decades after their demise: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/us/school-shootings-colum...

And they're doing this not just out of recklessness, but out of a pretty clear bias and desire to leverage these events to produce support for gun control.

Youi're showing a lot of cognitive bias here. It's very reasonable for the media to cover mass casualty events, that's definitely their job.

Another thing that has changed (which you haven't addressed at all) is that there are communities of mass shooting enthusiasts online who collect data on them, lionize the perpetrators, spread their manifestos, and encourage others to commit similar acts. People write guides with a mixture of justification for motives and sharing of practical techniques and advice, similar in format to the magazines periodically published by Al Qaeda. At least one such outfit has been designated as a terrorist group in several countries and several of its members have been arrested and are facing criminal charges.

>Another thing that has changed (which you haven't addressed at all) is that there are communities of mass shooting enthusiasts online who collect data on them, lionize the perpetrators, spread their manifestos

Which is directly enabled by the coverage mentioned in GP.

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.

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.

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.

> 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".

How have 40% of the perpetrators escaped? Seems a little high given how sensitive of a subject school shootings are.

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.

> 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?

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?

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

Is this globally or in one specific country though? It doesnt say anywhere on the page as far as I can see.

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.

There seems to be a disingenuous attempt by many respondents to get readers to focus on definitions and ignore the trends.

I suggest you to look at the second graph showing the fatal/wounded data pretty much mirrors the incident data. Then ask yourself if this is problematic.

EDIT: Here's one account of what these statistics mean for those involved: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/health/teacher-shooting-p...

are they still counting a pair of gang bangers shooting each other in the parking lot a school shooting?

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.

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.

Why can’t a gangbanger also be a student?

Because that's totally fine and in no way suggests guns are problematic.

> 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?

It is much easier for gangs to obtain guns in country where guns are so accessible.

Why should we not be concerned with that? People shooting eachother is bad, but also, bystanders get shot all the time in these.

You're more than welcome to include such incidents from the UK and Australia when comparing Australian, UK, and US school shootings.

With or without them the USofA is still Number One.

I wonder why the school shootings went up so much under Biden, and why we heard so little about it.

Guessing because, post COVID, school was back on again.

School shootings are down during summer too.

Depressing.

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.

My assumption was that something about the reporting changed. But I also don't know the answer.

I think it’s more that the world lost its collective mind after Covid in 2020.

Looks more like the rate of increase started going up in 2018

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.

Is this something the federal government even has any ability to control?

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.

Reasonable question.

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...

> 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.

[1] https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

By their definition, if an unused bullet is thrown at a brick wall on school property, that is a shooting. It doesn't even need a casing or propellent.

You know you can discharge a bullet by hitting with a rock right? You don't need a gun.

No, you can discharge a cartridge by hitting it with an improvised device. A bullet is just the metal bit in the front of the cartridge that goes flying. Hitting a bullet with a rock does nothing except maybe dent it.

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