Every shooting at a school in February 2025

Shootings on campus in February ranged from an elderly man opening fire during a high school drumline competition to a bullet deflecting off the laptop inside a student's backpack.

On February 6 at Challenger Elementary School in Huntsville, AL, a gun inside a 2nd grader’s backpack fired during dismissal. The bullet struck another student who was also wearing a backpack and the laptop inside deflected the round. Amazingly, nobody in the crowded hallway was injured.

On Saturday evening of February 1, an 83-year-old man drove 35 miles from his house in Spring, TX to Pasadena Memorial High. He opened fire in the hallway of the school while a high school drum line competition was taking place in the auditorium.

After firing two shots, he was quickly tackled and subdued by a group of parents. A high school music teacher was wounded and flown to a hospital. The elderly man had no connection to the school or the teacher he shot. He was in the car with his wife and said he needed to stop to use the bathroom before the shooting started. It appears that he was in an altered mental state because he told police that someone was chasing him (read more about it).

These are just two of the fourteen shootings on campus in February.

From looking at the data, both the number of shootings and the number of victims have fallen back to the post-COVID lockdown peaks.

This chart shows the number of incidents per month in 2023 (blue), 2024 (green), and so far in 2025 (yellow).

Looking at the number of incidents per month since January 2022, the trendline is slightly negative.

Nationwide Pattern?

This week Jeff Asher (Co-Founder at AH Datalytics) posted:

It is too early in the year to draw any firm conclusions, but gun violence is down quite a lot in 2025 relative to the start of 2024 in cities with available data with massive declines in several large US cities.

via crime data analyst Jeff Asher on LinkedIn

Jeff’s analysis of gun violence archive data shows “shooting victims are down roughly 17 percent through February 2025 compared to February 2024.” You can read more on the Jeff-alytics Substack.

Looking at the number of shootings on k-12 school campuses from September - February, this school year is down 20.7% compared to last year. The number of shootings is still more than double the pre-COVID rate.

It’s hard to know what the long-term trends are when there is so much randomness with these incidents. For example, last week in Houston, students were shot during three different fights just off campus after dismissal. One of the fights that turned into a shooting was 150 feet from the front doors of the same school (Pasadena Memorial High) where the elderly man opened fire inside earlier in the month.

Shooting Off Campus

On February 28, two students were shot during a fight at dismissal of Pasadena Memorial High (Houston, TX). The students were in a church parking lot about 150 feet from the front doors of the school.

On February 27, an Aldine High (Houston, TX) student was fatally shot during a fight at a McDonalds near the campus after dismissal. A 14-year-old was also fatally shot the same night in Houston during an argument with other teens a couple blocks from McReynolds Middle. When there is a shooting at dismissal, this usually means the student was carrying a gun on campus all day. About 600,000 students take a gun to school each year.

On February 26, a student was ambushed getting off a school bus in Alton, IL. On February 18, a student was critically wounded in a shooting a block from his high school in Chicago at dismissal. On February 16, a woman and a teen were shot near an elementary school in Stockton, CA. On February 3, a man shot at three people in a car near an elementary school in South Carolina putting multiple schools on lockdown.

I don’t even attempt to track every shooting near campus because the scope of this project would become unmanageable for one person. The K-12 School Shooting Database only includes shootings on school property. This means that shootings that happen around the campus aren’t included. These fights involved students who were probably carrying guns all day at school and the shooting easily could have been on campus, but they weren’t. That’s the randomness with this problem.

Averted Attacks

In February 2025, school shootings were averted in communities across the South and Midwest. These attacks were averted by tips from other students, parents, and community members. School shootings are rarely planned in secret which means there are opportunities to spot warning signs on social media, group chats, and forums like Discord (what parents need to know about Discord).

These averted plots targeted:

• Memorial High School - Houston, TX

• Mooresville High School - Mooresville, IN

• Madison Middle School - Nashville, TN

• Seminole Middle School - Seminole, FL

• Campbellsport Middle/High School - Campbellsport, WI

• McMinn County High School - McMinn, TN

• Unnamed Elementary School - Lubbock, TX

If you missed it, here is a look back at each planned attack that happened at a k-12 school since the start of the 2017-18 school year when Parkland happened.

Every Shooting in February 2025

February 26, 2025

Saint Rocco Parish School – Cleveland, OH

• Time Period: After School

• Location: Parking Lot

• Summary: Two adults were shot in the school parking lot.