FBI's 'gold standard' active shooter report leaves out some school shootings
Each year I'm baffled by the inability of the FBI to track and record the basic details about 'active shooter incidents in the United States'.
Every summer the FBI publishes a glossy report about the number of active shooter incidents that happened last year. This is the ‘gold standard’ report that will get referenced by ‘experts’ across the security industry. But most of these experts trust the FBI to do the work for them because they don’t compile extremely detailed data about shootings.
When you look closely at the k-12 school incidents in the FBI’s report compared to the K-12 School Shooting Database that I run, there are shootings that meet the FBI’s definition but aren’t in their report. Here are a few that are missing:
Man fired an AR-15 outside Phillipsburg Middle School when students were arriving for class.
Man with a rifle fired shots at police in the parking lot of Poteet High School then barricaded for 4 hours.
Man fired shots at school staff inside West Marion Primary School before he was tackled and restrained until police arrived.
While these three were shootings that didn’t make national news, I can’t believe the FBI missed the planned attack at Mount Horeb Middle School in Wisconsin. This was a Columbine-inspired suicide-by-cop by a 14-year-old student with a rifle, multiple pipe bombs, and a crude attempt at a homemade radiological ‘dirty bomb’.
The press conference by police officially literally said they “neutralized an active shooter outside of the school.”
Near Miss: Student had 'dirty bomb' at Mount Horeb Middle during school shooting
Wisconsin police have released 1,602 pages of police reports and evidence photos from the school shooting at Mount Horeb Middle on May 1, 2024.
The FBI should know all about the Mount Horeb school shooting because Wisconsin police released 1,602 pages of police reports and evidence photos about it. It was the first time ever that a school shooting plot involved improvised explosives with 5 grams of United Nuclear brand uranium ore. Luckily this was low grade radioactive material that’s mainly used for equipment calibration but the intent to cause harm was clear even if this young teenager didn’t have the means to make a more deadly bomb.
Scattering nuclear material with a conventional explosive was the terrorist ‘dirty bomb’ scenario that spurred billions of dollars of post-9/11 investments into the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and local police agencies. This exact situation (complex incident with active shooter plus bombing) has dominated emergency response planning and training for the last two decades…yet it’s left out of the FBI’s annual report.
2023 FBI Report was even worse
The FBI report last year left out seven shootings at just k-12 schools that meet their definition including one where the CCTV footage of the guy walking into the school with a gun was all over national news!
Seven 'active shooters' at schools the FBI forgot to include in their 2023 report
The FBI released a “comprehensive” report on Monday about active shooter incidents across the United States in 2023. For anyone who doesn’t pay close attention to these attacks and their details, this looks like a useful document. But it’s not.
FBI is a politically controlled agency
Unlike an academic paper that goes through a blind peer-review process, the FBI can write and publish whatever they want. If political appointees want to make it look like school shootings are less of a problem this year, they can just omit some from the report.
In the education snapshot, the omitted incidents make it look like attacks involving rifles are very rare with a very fast police response time and short incident duration.
If you put in the missing incidents, the majority of the shootings on school campuses would be committed with rifles. Can anyone think of a reason why this political administration and appointed FBI officials would want to downplay the incidents involving AR-15 rifles? (hint: both FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have spoken at numerous NRA events)
Badge ≠ truth
When you see a report with the FBI badge on the cover, this projects a sense of authority that usually isn’t questioned. But now more than ever, we need to realize that there are political influences that will manipulate the way data is presented from government agencies (or maybe the FBI just sucks at data tracking).
Either way, when you hear ‘experts’ and politicians quoting this report, be sure to think twice about the implications of basing plans, policy, and procedures on bad data.
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.
As a long time advocate for gun violence prevention (18 years) I am very concerned over the issue of FBI data collection and reporting. Many times I have testified using data from the Virginia Violent Death Reporting System, which exhaustively studies and reports on all violent deaths in the Commonwealth, only to have gun lobby representatives cast doubt on the figures stating that the FBI numbers are much lower than those I quoted. In particular they always want to downplay the number of homicides by semi auto rifles. I trust the VVDRS data much more than the FBI, but many lawmakers are more willing to take the FBI data as “gospel”. Thanks again for your accurate reporting on what is really going on in our schools.
Hi again, I was looking over your database and am wondering if you have a particular indicator for which entries would be parallel entries to ones that the FBI is cataloging in the Active Shooter Incident reports? In other words, of the 20154 entries that occur in your database covering the 2000-2024 period, which one of those would you consider to be Active Shooter Incidents?