CBS News explores school shooting data, USA TODAY interview, lessons from 9/11, and new published research

Plus: What can the average person do to prevent the next school shooting? I talked about lessons to learn from 9/11 and 'see something, say something' 18-months ago after Nashville.

Sep 13, 2024

Quick recap of the week after a high-profile school shooting at Apalachee High in rural Georgia. We now know the shooter’s mother warned school officials 30 minutes before the shooting, he snuck the AR-15 into the building inside a backpack, and we’ve seen video of the teen interviewed by police.

In the week since the Georgia school shooting made national news:

A student was fatally shot inside a Maryland high school bathroom during a fight
A student was fatally shot inside Omaha Northwest High during a fight at lunch
A female bystander student was shot outside South Oak Cliff High during a fight at dismissal
Three fans in the stands at Martinsburg High were wounded during a high school football game
A student pointed a loaded handgun at students on a Phoenix school bus following a fight
A Kentucky school staff member pointed a gun at a student’s head and threatened to kill him

Gun violence at schools happens every day and a story last night by CBS News explored some of the shootings at schools that don’t usually get national coverage.

CBS News: Schools focus on "hardening" buildings against mass shootings. Data show they're missing where most gun violence is happening.

A CBS News analysis of the K-12 School Shooting Database shows these "smaller" shootings are more frequent than mass shootings, like the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia on Sept. 4, in which two students and two teachers were killed. Taken together, those incidents are also killing more kids than gun violence that does make national news, such as the mass shootings at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde and now, Apalachee.

Researchers like David Riedman, who created the K-12 School Shooting Database, said often, school administrators don't learn lessons from past school shootings. Riedman believes they adopt policies and technological solutions, which don't address the reality of what's happening.
When violence does occur, CBS News found it's more often not inside the school but outside on school grounds such as parking lots, football fields and in front of buildings.

A CBS News analysis of all school shootings nationwide revealed since 2018, 84% of deadly shootings happened outside school walls. The investigation also shows nearly 95% of deadly school shootings in the 2023-2024 school year happened outside on school campus.
Last academic year, more than one-third of shootings at U.S. schools happened in parking lots, where often there is little security or attention from school administrators.

"Most of the incidents were not planned attacks," said Riedman. "They were fights that were escalating into shootings, domestic violence on campus, accidents, suicides, and when you look at the characteristics of those incidents, they are things that stem from conflict."

USA TODAY: Kids arrested, schools closed amid wave of threats after Georgia shooting

David Riedman, a criminal justice researcher and creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, said arresting a child for a threat that is not considered serious is not an effective way to prevent violence in schools and would likely result in them losing access to critical support systems.

“The strongest correlate to somebody being a lifetime habitual criminal offender and having multiple incarcerations is somebody that has justice involvement as a juvenile,” Riedman said. “So pretty much, if you arrest a kid for some type of threat, there's a very good chance that you're turning that kid into a lifetime, habitual offender. So that's not a good outcome at all.”

Whether a school shooting threat ends with an arrest or the case being closed is often left to the discretion of the individual doing the initial investigation. In Georgia, Riedman and other experts said they were disturbed to see deputies from the Jackson County Sheriff's Office had dismissed concerns so quickly after interviewing the teenager and his father in 2023.

Officers investigating a school shooting threat should look deeper to determine whether students have expressed a reason for wanting to commit a shooting, if they have planned or prepared in any way, for example by researching previous school shootings, Riedman said.

He added that the incident in Georgia shows the need for “a standardized, national system for information reporting,” around school shooting threats similar to the effort to combat terrorism after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, an effort he said could be assisted by artificial intelligence.

“It's that lots of different people in different agencies and different places all have the pieces of information that you would need to put together,” Riedman said. “But unless you create a standardized system and a standardized playbook that everybody's working towards, all of that piecemeal information is never going to get connected.”

There is no national database tracking threats against schools, but Riedman estimated there may be more than 100,000 each year. In a study of about 1,000 shooting threats at K–12 schools over four years, Riedman found the most common known resolution was the arrest of the person who made the threat.

Looking Back: What can the average person do to prevent the next school shooting?

18-months ago after the school shooting in Nashville, I talked about the same problems that happened last week at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. Highly preventable attacks happen over and over again because we haven’t setup a national system to stop them.

Riedman said it's likely there were a number of warning signs in the last few weeks or months that the Nashville school shooter was on a "pathway towards committing mass violence."
"What we really need to do is be setting up the social infrastructure for the same way things happened after 9/11 where 'see something, say something' was a national message that everybody knew and understood," Riedman said.
Riedman has tracked every school shooting since 1970 and said there are often noticeable changes before someone commits a mass shooting.
"If we have messages and education to the public to know how to spot those things, and then we have a system of infrastructure where somebody who is in crisis can get help, and there can be intervention before they commit mass violence. I think that is really the only way that we can address this," Riedman said.
In Nashville, the suspect got inside the school by shooting through a glass door. Riedman says the answer is not to get rid of glass doors.
"That's not viable," he said. "You're not going to pour concrete and fill in hundreds of first-floor windows and doors."
Again, he gave an analogy to the September 11th attacks of 2001, and how Americans responded to the tragedy.
"We couldn't build a wall around every building, and make sure every skyscraper could withstand a 747 hitting it," he said. "What we had to do was say, we're going to engage the public in preventing acts of terrorism."
Riedman said there must be intervention and help for people in crisis well before it gets to that point.
"Once somebody arrives with a gun on campus, it's already too late," Riedman said. "It is very, very difficult to stop a surprise attack from a determined assailant, so we need to make every step possible in the weeks and months prior to try and avert the violence."
"It's a very, very complex problem. I don't think anybody really understands the breadth of these issues and the complexity of dealing with each one," he said.

New Published Research

Urban Public Spaces, Events, and Gun Violence

The K-12 School Shooting Database reported that 17% of school-related shootings transpire at a sporting event. Since 2013, there have been 171 shootings at school sporting events across the country, causing 22 deaths and 171 injuries.

School Shootings In The United States: An Analysis Of Micro And Macro Level Variables

In 2023, by November 2, there had been 45 school shootings resulting in fatalities and injuries (Matthews, 2023). There were 193 shooting incidents in preschools and K–12 schools during the previous school year, which is greater than an average of 49 incidents each school year since 2013 (Everytown Research & Policy, 2022). This predictive quantitative study offers a comprehensive analysis of various state-level, school-level, and individual-level variables, such as the laws related to guns, access to mental health services, economics, type of school shooting, socio-demographic indicators, school type, and timing of the incident toward informing effective preventative policies.

It utilized information from five data sets: the K-12 School Shooting Database, Giffords Law Center, KFF Data Base, State of Mental Health in America Report, and the Washington Post School Shooting Database. The data were analyzed with t-tests and regression using a layered ecological contextual theoretical framework to understand what increases the possibility of school shootings with casualties. The findings revealed that school factors such as indoor locations, targeted victims, and the presence of School Resource Officers, and macro factors such as limited youth access to mental health services and a high percentage of youth in poverty are predictive of school shootings with casualties.

My articles and podcasts from the past week

In case you just subscribed or missed it:

David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports

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