Every shooting at a school in October 2024

Sporting events continue to be the most common time period for a shooting on a k-12 school campus in the United States. Most shootings were escalations of disputes.

There is good, bad, and very bad news about the trends with shootings at schools in October 2024.

• Good news: The number of shootings each month since 2021 is showing a stable pattern rather than exponential growth.

• Bad news: There are still 6-10x more shooting incidents and victims than a decade ago.

• Really bad news: Seven people were fatally shot at schools in October including a man killed during the homecoming tailgate in Louisiana, a teen fatally shot on the school basketball court in New York, and parents killed during youth football game played at high schools in Wisconsin, California, and Colorado.

Each of these shootings presents new challenges for school security and keeping every student, teacher, parent, and visitor safe on campus. A couple incidents that highlight the complexity of this problem are:

• An off-duty police sergeant fired a shot at a woman during a domestic dispute at student drop-off. He was subdued by a school police officer, placed on leave without pay, and is facing multiple felony charges including attempted kidnapping. In most states, off-duty police are allowed to carry guns on school property and a “good guy with a gun” can go bad. Student drop-off and pick-up are predictable times when a domestic abuser knows that their intimate partner will be at the school.

• A 5-year-old who was left unattended in a vehicle found a loaded gun and fired a shot at the school during dismissal. The shooting took place in Alabama where it is legal to keep a loaded and unsecured gun inside a car.

• An adult man with an AR-15 rifle and a pistol fired shots into the air outside of a Kansas middle school at 8am as classes were starting. He was suffering from a psychological crisis and likely planned “suicide by cop” because he knew there would be an immediate police response to the school. An interesting twist is that his AR-15 rifle was not loaded and he wasn’t carrying any ammo for it. When most school shooters and mass shooters are actively suicidal, a location with armed staff and a rapid police response may be an ideal target.

Analyzing the trends

Since 2021, there have been ~30 people shot on campus each October. This year there were 25 victims wounded or killed. There was a slight uptick in the number of fatalities. As I’ve written in the past, there is a huge element of randomness in the path that a bullet travels being fatal, a survivable injury, or missing.

A skilled shooter with multiple weapons in a rural area might kill 40 people. If that same incident happened in an urban area, the death toll could be 10 because there are more police to respond and faster medical treatment. Does that make one incident significant while the other isn’t? If a shooter with 1,000 rounds of ammo carefully planned an attack, but his gun jammed after shooting the first victim, is that incident less of a “mass shooting” than someone who fired 10 shots from a handgun during an argument at a BBQ and hits 5 bystanders? (Read more: Stop the Arbitrary Benchmark for a Mass Shooting)

Regardless of victims being killed, injured, or all the shots missing, the frequency of shootings on campus and the number of victims is much higher than it was a decade ago.

Just like September, sporting events continue to be the most common time for a shooting on campus. The shootings in October were a mix of high school games and youth football games played inside the high school stadiums.

Also following the recent trends, parking lots were the most common location for a shooting on campus.

And also following the pattern driving the increased number of shootings on campus since 2018, the most common situation was a dispute that escalated into a shooting. Teens and adults who habitually carry handguns are driving this trend (see more: Students arrested with concealed handguns inside schools every day).

20 episodes of the ‘Back to School Shootings’ Podcast

The 20th episode of my podcast with Shea Swauger is the most unique and in-depth discussion that I've had on the show so far. Shea is a PhD student at University of Colorado and talks about growing up in Littleton, CO next to Columbine High School and raising kids today in a community that has been profoundly impacted by gun violence.

Me: "You brought up the statistical rarity of kids being shot at school, the most dangerous place statistically for a kid is to be in a house that has an unsecured firearm. If parent who decides that they're going to homeschool their kid because they don't like the values or lessons or facts that are being taught at school, and if they're also a parent who has an unsecured firearm in their house, they're actually bringing their child every day into the most dangerous place for that kid.

Me: The most likely outcome of having an unsecured weapon in your house is either an accidental shooting of a family member, a suicide, or an intimate partner who's shot during a domestic dispute. All of those things are many times more likely than a school shooting."

Shea: I also want to reframe school safety more broadly. That is not just about guns. So when I think about safety, to me, feeling safe is not just that I'm not being shot. Like there's a lot of other criteria when I think about being safe. And I think for a lot of kids, school is one of the most reliable places that you can eat.

Shea: If you're food insecure – and there's a lot of children that are food insecure – Going to school and having access to a breakfast and a lunch that's relatively nutritious comparatively to maybe what they don't have elsewhere, where they have access to adults that can help them out of an abusive situation, where they have access to healthcare in a way that they wouldn't otherwise if they're sick and they can go to the nurse's office.

Shea: Maybe that's the first time they encounter mental health care. They can say like, hey, I've noticed you're really struggling with this feeling. Maybe you want to talk about it. And that can be a pipeline into conversations about mental illness if they are experiencing that or if they need support systems, social or emotional support systems because of it. A lot of things that are going on and maybe at home.

Shea: I think school safety needs to be contextually broader to include everything that a child can experience there.

Earlier in October, I had an excellent conversation with New York Times best-selling author and trauma surgeon Dr. Brian Williams.

You can listen to my podcast for free on Substack or find Back to School Shootings on Apple Music, Spotify, any podcast app, and every episode is on YouTube.

Description of each shooting

• Date: October 31, 2024
  Time Period: School Start
  School Name: Riverview Elementary School
  City: Painesville, OH
  Summary: Off-duty police officer shot at a woman during a domestic dispute at drop-off, subdued by SRO.