School Shootings in the United States: 1997–2022
Methods/Results
To achieve our study's objectives, we utilized two publicly available datasets to document the frequency of school shootings and school mass shootings spanning from the 1997–1998 school year to the 2021–2022 school year. These datasets, drawn from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security's School Shooting Safety Compendium and Mother Jones' US Mass Shootings, 1982–2023 database, offer complementary information, providing a comprehensive longitudinal perspective on these incidents over the past 25 years. Despite challenges such as the absence of a centralized database for all gun violence incidents and varying definitions across databases, we adhered to the definitions provided by each dataset. In our study, a "school shooting" encompasses any instance of a gun being brandished, fired, or impacting school property, while a "school mass shooting" involves three or more fatalities at a kindergarten through 12th-grade school site. Our analyses are based on incidents cataloged in each dataset in accordance with these criteria, presenting holistic, descriptive results tabulated for each school year.
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Across the span of the 1997–1998 to the 2021–2022 school years, there were 1453 school shootings documented in the United States. Notably, the frequency of these incidents has exhibited a noticeable increase over the past 25 years, initially maintaining relative stability, then experiencing a slight decline before sharply rising in recent years (Fig 1). Throughout this period, the number of incidents per school year varied from 15 to 328, with a low of 15 recorded during the 2009–2010 school year and a peak of 328 during the 2021–2022 school year. Particularly striking is the significant surge in school shootings over the last five school years, totaling 794 incidents from 2017–2018 to 2021–2022, surpassing the combined total of 659 incidents recorded in the previous 15 school years (n = 659).
Figures/Graphs, Videos.
