SRO accidentally shot himself before a high school football game. How often does this happen?

As more schools have police officers on campus, there are more officer-involved shootings and 'accidental discharges' by police at k-12 schools.

Updated on December 14, 2024

Five times this week, a school police officer or security guard accidentally fired their gun on campus. During one of these shootings, a veteran police officer died after accidentally shooting himself. Any time a gun is fired at a school—intentionally or accidentally—there is a risk of a student or staff member being killed. As more school staff are armed with guns, the risk of a student being shot is increasing.

1. Oklahoma police officer's holstered gun fired while he was passing out junior officer badge stickers to elementary school kids on the playground.

2. Pennsylvania school security guard fired his gun in the school breakroom.

3. Honolulu high school security guard was critically injured after shooting himself in the leg inside the school.

4. San Antonio police officer was killed after shooting himself while preparing equipment for an active shooter drill at an elementary school. (update: now reported the officer was being investigated for recording a minor in a bathroom and the officer commit suicide before the training session)

5. Delaware school constable accidentally fired his gun inside a staff break room.

So far this year, there have been 5x more accidental shootings on campus than the indiscriminate attacks that these officers and school staff are armed to protect students against.

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Original Article: Before the Friday night football game at Marble Falls High School in Texas on September 20, a school police officer shot himself in the leg. Three JROTC students jumped into action and applied a tourniquet before the officer was airlifted to a hospital.

The next day, officials in New York announced that a Frankfort police officer had been arrested for accidentally firing an unregistered handgun at the Frankfort-Schuyler Elementary School open house on September 3. The sound of a gunshot during the back-to-school night event sent parents into a panic and locked down the building.

These two officer-involved shootings this month are not the first time that a police officer has accidentally fired a gun on a k-12 school campus. In 2022, an SRO in Florida was “dry firing” a gun in his office when he accidentally fired a shot that went through the wall of his office, across a hallway, through the wall of an occupied classroom, and lodged in a bookcase.

Accidentally firing a gun on campus isn’t a problem that is exclusive to police officers. In the past six years, the number of accidental shootings on campus has significantly increased. These accidents range from a gun falling out of a grandfather’s pants and firing while he was picking up an elementary school kid to an adult spectator dropping his backpack with a gun inside that fired during a high school wrestling match. In 2021, Giffords Law Center published a report with the details of 100 accidental shootings on campus.

I classify an incident as “officer-involved” when a police officer, SRO, or armed security guard was the only person to fire a weapon. These incidents were rare from the 1960s to the end of the 1990s. As school policing has become more widespread, the rate of these shootings has increased.

Analyzing Officer-Involved Shootings on Campus

Within the “officer-involved” classification, I filtered the incidents for just the accidental shootings. I found 3 accidents with officers between 1966-2017. There have been 11 accidental discharges by officers at schools since 2018.