Students arrested with concealed handguns inside schools every day

Just like school shootings, the federal government doesn't collect data on guns found and arrests made for firearms inside schools. Meanwhile, ~600,000 students are carrying guns on campus.

The most common situation for a shooting at a k-12 school is a fight that escalates into a shooting. In these cases, nobody was planning to fire shots until the fight started. If a kid has a gun when a fight starts, he or she was probably carrying it on campus for days, weeks, months, or even years before the fight happened.

In my interview with a former school police officer and current school security director, he believes that students have guns on campus every single day.

The annual CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey data shows that 3.5% of high school kids (~605,000 students) have taken a gun to school in the last year. These teens aren't walking around holding a visible gun, the weapon is concealed until they pull it out during a fight, or worse, a surprise attack that starts inside the school (see: Apalachee High last week and Perry High on Jan 4, 2024). The sheriff confirmed the AR-15 rifle used at Apalachee High was snuck into the school inside a backpack.

The idea of 600,000 students having guns on campus seems beyond belief until you realize how many shootings take place at schools all over the country. There are 54 million students attending 130,000 public and private school campuses. Shots are fired multiple times every week at schools in every part of the country and every sized community from small towns to the biggest cities.

Interactive map filtered for 2022-24

In my google alerts, I see multiple stories every day about students arrested with guns. Most of the guns are found based on tips from other students or when the student is searched for a different reason like vaping or the odor of drugs.

Many schools have security, metal detectors, AI systems, and fortifications but kids are still getting arrested with guns inside these schools because either:

1. Staff aren't trained

2. Equipment doesn't work well to detect concealed handguns

3. It's easy to bypass the screening

4. Nobody to staff the checkpoint during late arrival (because teachers need to teach classes and can’t be at a checkpoint all day)

5. There are too many students with not enough time to do searches of every backpack, pocket, and sock.

(See more: Why TSA-style security doesn't work for schools)

Even 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 first generation AI scanners, these security screenings can fail to detect compact handguns and 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. If schools use the manufacturer’s recommended settings, Evolv scanners will not detect compact handguns like the Sig Sauer 9mm handgun the kid has in the bodycam video.

Students are also getting arrested with cheap, mostly plastic handguns like this 9mm Taurus GTC which was loaded with an extended plastic magazine. This handgun can be purchased for $250 and is one of the most common guns found inside schools.

During an old-fashioned manual bag search, a compact handgun could easily be inside a pouch, pocket, or between pages of a book. It’s common for a student to come to school with a backpack, laptop/tablet case, gym bag, lunch box, and purse/crossbody bag.

Few examples of handguns found inside students’ backpacks at schools this year

Each of these bags can have multiple pockets and any of those pockets could have a compact gun or extra magazine hidden inside.

More results from my school security survey

This problem isn’t limited to “real guns” because replica handguns are also being found inside schools. These ultra realistic BB guns do not have an orange tip and are indistinguishable from real handguns until they are inspected up close.

In the bodycam video at the start of this article, the kid has a handgun tucked in the center of his pants with an extra magazine in his backpack. How many entry searches or screening systems would find a gun concealed in a student’s crotch and a magazine in a backpack?

More importantly, how many schools have staff doing entry screenings who are trained, equipped, and take the threat of a student with a gun seriously?

This is a matrix of The Matrix Problem for school security

Based on the data, there is a kid carrying a gun just like this inside almost every high school in the country each day.

Data on students arrested with guns

Just like school shooting data, the federal government doesn’t collect or report data on the number of students who are arrested at schools with guns. Over the last year, I set-up google alerts for “student arrested with gun” and “gun found on campus”. Both of these alerts produce a bunch of stories every day. So far, I’ve coded more than 600 cases of guns found on campus.

Less than 10% of news reports for guns found on campus are during entry search. The majority are during morning classes, which means that a student is already inside the school with a gun when police and school officials find out about the weapon. This can create a dangerous situation where police need to plan how to separate the armed student from classmates without escalating the situation into a shooting.