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I noticed the increase over time too. In the 1920s, the era of Al Capone and friends shooting up restaurants with submachine guns, there were 10 incidents of school shootings. What's up with that? I guess the population was smaller ... was it 26 times smaller than the 2010s (259 incidents)? I checked, and in fact the difference is about a factor of 3, not 26.

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The largest school massacre in US history[0] happened in the 1920s. It was accomplished with high explosives. There were several school bombings in the 1950s too but few shootings. For whatever reason, school shootings displaced school bombings in recent decades. It has been a long time since there has been a major school bombing.

Bombings were the popular mode of creating mass casualties 50+ years ago even though actual machine-guns were widely available back then and almost completely unavailable for the last several decades.

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

Interestingly Columbine was also supposed to be a bombing, but it didn't work. I guess that was the tipping point.

The U.S. population has about tripled since 1920.

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