2021: Breaking School Shooting Records
As 2021 comes to an end, it shatters the record for gun violence at K-12 schools in the United States. Shots were fired on school campuses…
As 2021 comes to an end, it shatters the record for gun violence at K-12 schools in the United States. Shots were fired on school campuses 249 times, more than double 2018–2021, and 4–10 times more than years between 1970–2017. Unlike the planned attacks in 2018 at Parkland, FL, Santa Fe, TX, and Benton, KY, that drew extensive media coverage when this project began, 2021 featured many isolated, low-profile incidents across the country.
The majority of these incidents resulted from disputes between students that escalated into shootings. In October at Timberview High School in Arlington, Texas, a student fired multiple shots during a fight inside a classroom wounding 3 students and a teacher. The week prior, a Memphis student shot a classmate during a fight in the hallway. More than 30 shootings occurred at high school football games including in Charlotte, where players fled the field after several shots rang out in the stands. After a game in Colorado Springs, when two teens and an adult were shot just outside a school. And in Philly, a game was interrupted after 20 shots were fired and the perpetrators ran across the field.
This wave of systemic gun violence in schools culminated with the planned attack at Oxford High School on November 30. This was the first deliberate “rampage shooting” at a school since a student at Saugus High School shot 5 students before killing himself in 2019. This story could be much different if significant planned attacks weren’t averted at schools this fall in Florida, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Pennsylvania (again), and Florida (again).
Op-Eds
This fall, working with Dr. Jillian Peterson and Dr. James Densley from The Violence Project, we published a series of Op-Eds highlighting the challenges schools face with the rise of both actual shootings and threats of attacks.
Education Week: Assessing Shooting Threats Is a Matter of Life or Death. Why Aren’t Experts Better at It?
With each threat investigation, school officials must weigh one student’s future against the health and safety of an entire school community. A wrong decision either way could change lives forever. Most school personnel do this without any formal training or standardized guidance. And the Oxford school shooting may set a precedent for criminally charging school staff for making the wrong decision.
Even the “experts” on threat assessment find this work difficult. We recently surveyed 229 senior law-enforcement officials and officers directly responsible for assessing threats and asked them to rate the severity of fictitious scenarios representative of common school shooting threats on a scale from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest). One example read: “A teacher at Oak Creek Elementary finds a student’s drawing of stick figures portraying a school shooting in a trash can.”
This situation is eerily similar to what happened at Oxford High School last month. There, a teacher found a note with a drawing of a gun and a bullet and the words, “The thoughts won’t stop help me” and “blood everywhere,” on it. In our fictitious scenario, however, 62 percent of the experts rated the threat as low, between 1–3 on the 10-point scale. Only 27 of the 229 scored it 8 or higher.
The Conversation: School shootings are at a record high this year — but they can be prevented
The data we use to track school shootings is a comprehensive database that includes information on “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” going back to 1970.
Working with its co-creator, David Riedman, we uncovered a record 151 school shooting threats in the “back-to-school” month of September 2021, up from a three-year average of 29. Actual school shootings also more than doubled during September 2021 compared with the same month in previous years.
There were 55 school shootings in September 2021, up from 24 in September 2020 and 14 in September 2019. But the school carnage began well before the 2021 school year got underway for most students, as evidenced in the Aug. 13 fatal shooting of 13-year-old Bennie Hargrove at Washington Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
These trends are part of an overall rise in shootings and murders in 2020 and 2021, tied in part to record gun sales. More guns in more hands increases the likelihood that a firearm will find its way into a school.
The Washington Post: School shootings are increasing — and changing. Easily accessible guns are to blame.
Our analysis of the data shows these incidents were different in nature than the school shootings of previous years. They were more likely to take place during the school day or at sporting events. Both the shooters and the victims were more likely to be children or teenagers, as opposed to adults, compared with previous years. The perpetrators were more likely to be students of the school or in some cases, their family members.
These 55 September shootings were not the premeditated attacks that schools rehearse for with “active shooter drills.” The majority were fights that escalated out of control — including fistfights that devolved into shootouts because students happened to be armed, or retaliatory shootings stemming from interpersonal conflicts on the streets.
Eleven of the September shootings occurred at or around high school football games, and some of the most frightening scenes barely made the local news. At a game in Charlotte, players, coaches and officials fled the field after several gunshots were heard. After a game in Colorado Springs, two teens and an adult were shot just outside a school. And in Philadelphia, a game was cut short after 20 shots were fired nearby. The apparent perpetrators ran across the field, leaving a 14-year-old and 16-year-old wounded.
Star Tribune: School closures are costly caution — but are still not enough to prevent tragedies
School closures offer no long-term solution to school violence. Our research shows that the lead-up to a school shooting is years of trauma, isolation and hopelessness, and months of preparation.
Would a student who has assembled a hit list and an arsenal of “ghost guns” simply give up on the plan of attack because school was closed that day?
School closures also are expensive. The cumulative economic cost of shuttering schools nationwide last week is billions of taxpayer dollars. That’s on top of the costs to frustrated parents missing work to home-school their children and anxious children missing valuable classroom learning time to process the prospect of potentially being shot and killed at school.
Los Angeles Times: The rise in school shooting threats is alarming — and a cry for help
Weighing how to respond to threats is getting harder because threats of violence are rising at the same time schools are dealing with an unprecedented number of shootings — 205 so far this year.
In September, a record 151 school shooting threats were made, up from a three-year average of 29 for the month. This means a staggering 63% of all shooting threats made at the start of the school year since 2018 were made this year. Half of those threats came via social media and 28% were made by someone who had access to a gun.
These statistics come from the K-12 School Shooting Database, conducted in partnership with the Violence Project mass shooting research center. Since 2018, reported shooting threats to U.S. schools have been tallied — 41 occurred in September 2018 and 35 the following September. In September 2020, when many schools were closed or socially distanced, 11 threats were reported.
This September, a police response was common — 45% of all threats resulted in an arrest. However, only about half of those arrests were for threats deemed credible, meaning that they showed a capability to attack by having access to a firearm, a detailed plan or through other means. The rest were hoaxes, like the ones sent to schools last week.
The Tennessean (USA Today): Students, teachers must feel safe to report school shooting threats
Through a collaboration between the K-12 School Shooting Database and , databases of mass shootings, we have tracked nearly 600 threats since 2018. This data can help schools prepare for and prevent threats.
Most cases in our study were not credible threats of violence. Students made jokes on social media or used “squirt gun” emojis. But 51 cases did involve someone, most often a male student, who had real intent to commit a shooting and ready access to a firearm. Arrests were made in 90% of these incidents, which typically were averted because classmates or teachers reported them.
These cases highlight the importance of interpersonal communication in schools and knowing the warning signs of violent intent. As schools reopen to students who have been isolated, teachers and staff must be given time and space to rebuild trust and relationships so students feel comfortable talking to them. This trust is crucial because threats of violence, our research shows, are often cries for help veiling suicidal, not homicidal, intent — mass shooters in particular expect to die in the act. Teen suicide is rising; schools must balance social distancing with social and emotional support.
2022 and Beyond
It remains too early to determine if the number of incidents recorded for 2021, and the totals in 2018–2021, is a growing trend, or a byproduct of better data collection, since this project started after the attack in Parkland, FL. It is clear that each of these incidents of gunfire at a school have a profound impact on all of the students, teachers, parents, and community members involved regardless of how many people are killed and injured. It also remains challenging to draw comparisons between years because intangible factors like narrowly averted attacks have a significant impact on the number of victims. Rather than focusing on just the numbers, everyone should remember that finding the best strategy for enhancing school security and preventing school shootings is a very complex issue.
To find out more about these incidents and other acts of gun violence at K-12 schools, please visit www.k12ssdb.org.
Follow us on twitter @k12ssdb.
David Riedman is a criminologist, co-founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database, and a PhD student at the University of Central Florida.