Guns vs. Knives: Five times (5x) more shootings at schools in 2023
Knives are easily accessible in every home yet students are more likely to shoot, rather than stab, a classmate during a fight. When shots are fired, they are 3x more fatal.
When parents from The Covenant School in Nashville testified to the Tennessee legislature about the urgent need for gun policy reform, a Republican politician responded that “if guns were less readily available, the assailant would have just run over the children [with a vehicle] at recess.”
From six years of studying planned attacks on k-12 campuses across the country, I can confidently say that there has never been an intentional vehicle ramming targeting random students at an American school. There have been more than 1,500 shootings at high schools where roughly half of the students are old enough to drive a car to school.
There’s something different about guns from other means of causing harm. Every day there are thousands of opportunities when students could intentionally drive over their classmates, and almost any student could take a knife to school. Yet, the vast majority of attacks with weapons at schools in 2023 involved guns.
Data on shootings and stabbings at schools in 2023
There is no official government database that records violent crimes—shootings, stabbings, aggravated assaults—on k-12 school campuses. I’ve used media reports to track school shootings for the last 6 years, so I decided to put together a spreadsheet of the stabbings at schools in 2023.
Despite knives being widely available, guns are more frequently used at schools. When someone is shot, there is a higher fatality rate compared to stabbing victims.
Here are the numbers for 2023:
5x more incidents with shots fired (345) than stabbings (75)
3x higher fatality rate for shootings (22%) than stabbings (7.7%)
3.5x more total shooting victims (244 wounded and killed) than total stabbing victims (78 injured and killed)
Zero “mass” knife attacks with 4+ victims compared to 5 shootings with 4+ victims
39 shootings with more than 1 victim compared to 5 stabbings with more than 1 victim
In just my kitchen, there are 27 different knives including paring knives, carving knives, chef’s knife, cleaver, steak knives, box cutter, Swiss army knife, folding utility knife, and Leatherman multitool with a knife. If one of these knives went missing—aside from my favorite chef’s knife—I wouldn’t notice for days or weeks. Any teenager can easily take a knife from their house and carry it to school. Teens are also allowed to buy knives in stores or can Same Day Prime an 11” machete on Amazon for $30.
Deeper Dive into the Data
A correlation coefficient is a numerical measure that shows a statistical relationship between two variables. The coefficient ranges from “1” to “-1” with 1 being a perfect positive relationship (when one variable goes up, the other variable goes up), 0 being no relationship, and -1 being a perfect negative relationship (when one goes up, the other always goes down).
The correlation coefficient between the number of stabbings and shootings per month in 2023 is approximately 0.56. This indicates a moderate positive correlation. In other words, months with a higher number of stabbing incidents tend to also have a higher number of shooting incidents.
Further analysis of more data is needed to figure out what this relationship means and the other variables that impact the occurrence of both shootings and stabbings.
Deterrence Effect?
When it is easier to sneak a knife into a school, why do students still commit violence with guns more often than knives?
If a school has a security checkpoint, students go through security each day and figure out what gets detected and overlooked. At schools with traditional metal detectors or AI scanners, these security screenings can fail to detect knives.
From The Intercept: A 17-year-old-student walked straight through a weapons detection system at Proctor High School in Utica, New York with a knife. No alert went off. He then approached a fellow student, pulled a hunting-style knife out of his backpack, and repeatedly stabbed the other student.
The Utica City School District had installed the $4 million weapons detection system across 13 of its schools earlier that summer, mostly with public funds. The scanners, from Massachusetts-based Evolv Technology, look like metal detectors but scan for “signatures” for “guns, bombs, and large tactical knives”.
One test found that 42% of the time, a knife was able to elude the detection system.
During an old-fashioned manual bag search, a knife could easily be inside a pouch, pocket, or between pages of a book. A gun is much larger and heavier than a knife which makes it more difficult to hide. It’s common for a student to come to school with a backpack, laptop/tablet case, gym bag, lunch box, and purse/crossbody bag. Each of these bags can have multiple pockets and any of those pockets could have a knife hidden inside.
A 15 second bag search for 2,000 students takes 30,000 seconds of searching (about 8 hours). If a school wants to get students inside within 15 minutes, they need 32 trained staff members doing 15 second checks. Most schools don’t have dozens of dedicated security staff so the people searching bags will likely be teachers who can’t go to their classrooms until all the searches are complete. Any delay or extended check will cut into class time.
In the real world, staff members doing 15 second bag checks as hundreds of students wait to get into the school building don’t have the time to check every part of each backpack and garment for a knife.
Are knives and stabbings a big problem?
Ideally, no student should have any type of weapon inside a school. My data shows that compared to guns, knives can be a lower priority on the long list of concerns for school officials. Even with 60 million students who have access to knives every day attending 130,000 k-12 schools, there were just 75 stabbings during 2023. By comparison, guns are not easily accessible to every student, yet shootings happened at schools 5x more often.
If there is a stabbing, it’s rare to have more than 1 victim (5 of 75 stabbing incidents) and the fatality rate for stabbing is less than 8%. Unlike a student with a gun, an unarmed adult can subdue a student with a knife.
When politicians say that guns are not the issue and that violent students will instead use other weapons like knives or vehicles to kill their classmates, this data does not support that assertion.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.