thesis on school shootings

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Springer Nature - PMC COVID-19 Collection

An Examination of US School Mass Shootings, 2017–2022: Findings and Implications

Antonis katsiyannis.

1 Department of Education and Human Development, College of Education, Clemson University, 101 Gantt Circle, Room 407 C, Clemson, SC 29634 USA

Luke J. Rapa

2 Department of Education and Human Development, College of Education, Clemson University, 101 Gantt Circle, Room 409 F, Clemson, SC 29634 USA

Denise K. Whitford

3 Steven C. Beering Hall of Liberal Arts and Education, Purdue University, 100 N. University Street, BRNG 5154, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2098 USA

Samantha N. Scott

4 Department of Education and Human Development, College of Education, Clemson University, 101 Gantt Circle, Room G01A, Clemson, SC 29634 USA

Gun violence in the USA is a pressing social and public health issue. As rates of gun violence continue to rise, deaths resulting from such violence rise as well. School shootings, in particular, are at their highest recorded levels. In this study, we examined rates of intentional firearm deaths, mass shootings, and school mass shootings in the USA using data from the past 5 years, 2017–2022, to assess trends and reappraise prior examination of this issue.

Extant data regarding shooting deaths from 2017 through 2020 were obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the web-based injury statistics query and reporting system (WISQARS), and, for school shootings in particular (2017–2022), from Everytown Research & Policy.

The number of intentional firearm deaths and the crude death rates increased from 2017 to 2020 in all age categories; crude death rates rose from 4.47 in 2017 to 5.88 in 2020. School shootings made a sharp decline in 2020—understandably so, given the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent government or locally mandated school shutdowns—but rose again sharply in 2021.

Conclusions

Recent data suggest continued upward trends in school shootings, school mass shootings, and related deaths over the past 5 years. Notably, gun violence disproportionately affects boys, especially Black boys, with much higher gun deaths per capita for this group than for any other group of youth. Implications for policy and practice are provided.

On May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old man killed 19 students and two teachers and wounded 17 individuals at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, using an AR-15-style rifle. Outside the school, he fired shots for about 5 min before entering the school through an unlocked side door and locked himself inside two adjoining classrooms killing 19 students and two teachers. He was in the school for over an hour (78 min) before being shot dead by the US Border Patrol Tactical Unit, though police officers were on the school premises (Sandoval, 2022 ).

The Robb Elementary School mass shooting, the second deadliest school mass shooting in American history, is the latest calamity in a long list of tragedies occurring on public school campuses in the USA. Regrettably, these tragedies are both a reflection and an outgrowth of the broader reality of gun violence in this country. In 2021, gun violence claimed 45,027 lives (including 20,937 suicides), with 313 children aged 0–11 killed and 750 injured, along with 1247 youth aged 12–17 killed and 3385 injured (Gun Violence Archive, 2022a ). Mass shootings in the USA have steadily increased in recent years, rising from 269 in 2013 to 611 in 2020. Mass shootings are typically defined as incidents in which four or more people are killed (Katsiyannis et al., 2018a ). However, the Gun Violence Archive considers mass shootings to be incidents in which four or more people are injured (Gun Violence Archive, 2022b ). Regardless of these distinctions in definition, in 2020, there were 19,384 gun murders, representing a 34% increase from the year before, a 49% increase over a 5-year period, and a 75% increase over a 10-year period (Pew Research Center, 2022 ). Regarding school-based shootings, to date in 2022, there have been at least 95 incidents of gunfire on school premises, resulting in 40 deaths and 76 injuries (Everytown Research & Policy, 2022b ). Over the past few decades, school shootings in the USA have become relatively commonplace: there were more in 2021 than in any year since 1999, with the median age of perpetrators being 16 (Washington Post, 2022 ; see also, Katsiyannis et al., 2018a ). Additionally, analysis of Everytown’s Gunfire on School Grounds dataset and related studies point to several key observations to be considered in addressing this challenge. For example, 58% of perpetrators had a connection to the school, 70% were White males, 73 to 80% obtained guns from home or relatives or friends, and 100% exhibited warning signs or showed behavior that was of cause for concern; also, in 77% of school shootings, at least one person knew about the shooter’s plan before the shooting events occurred (Everytown Research & Policy, 2021a ).

The USA has had 57 times as many school shootings as all other major industrialized nations combined (Rowhani-Rahbar & Moe, 2019 ). Guns are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the USA, with children ages 5–14 being 21 times and adolescents and young adults ages 15–24 being 23 times more likely to be killed with guns compared to other high-income countries. Furthermore, Black children and teens are 14 times and Latinx children and teens are three times more likely than White children to die by guns (Everytown Research & Policy, 2021b ). Children exposed to violence, crime, and abuse face a host of adverse challenges, including abuse of drugs and alcohol, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, school failure, and involvement in criminal activity (Cabral et al., 2021 ; Everytown Research and Policy, 2022b ; Finkelhor et al., 2013 ).

Yet, despite gun violence being considered a pressing social and public health issue, federal legislation passed in 1996 has resulted in restricting funding for the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The law stated that no funding earmarked for injury prevention and control may be used to advocate or promote firearm control (Kellermann & Rivara, 2013 ). More recently, in June 2022, the US Supreme Court struck down legislation restricting gun possession and open carry rights (New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 2021 ), broadening gun rights and increasing the risk of gun violence in public spaces. Nonetheless, according to Everytown Research & Policy ( 2022a ), states with strong gun laws experience fewer deaths per capita. In the aggregate, states with weaker gun laws (i.e., laws that are more permissive) experience 20.0 gun deaths per 100,000 residents versus 7.4 per 100,000 in states with stronger laws. The association between gun law strength and per capita death is stark (see Table ​ Table1 1 ).

Gun law strength and gun law deaths per 100,000 residents

Accounting for the top eight and the bottom eight states in gun law strength, gun law strength and gun deaths per 100,000 are correlated at r  =  − 0.85. Stronger gun laws are thus meaningfully linked with fewer deaths per capita. Data obtained from Everytown Research & Policy ( 2022a )

Notwithstanding the publicity involving gun shootings in schools, particularly mass shootings, violence in schools has been steadily declining. For example, in 2020, students aged 12–18 experienced 285,400 victimizations at school and 380,900 victimizations away from school; an annual decrease of 60% for school victimizations (from 2019 to 2020) (Irwin et al., 2022 ). Similarly, youth arrests in general in 2019 were at their lowest level since at least 1980; between 2010 and 2019, the number of juvenile arrests fell by 58%. Yet, arrests for murder increased by 10% (Puzzanchera, 2021 ).

In response to school violence in general, and school shootings in particular, schools have increasingly relied on increased security measures, school resource officers (SROs), and zero tolerance policies (including exclusionary and aversive measures) in their attempts to curb violence and enhance school safety. In 2019–2020, public schools reported controlled access (97%), the use of security cameras (91%), and badges or picture IDs (77%) to promote safety. In addition, high schools (84%), middle schools (81%), and elementary schools (55%) reported the presence of SROs (Irwin et al., 2022 ). Research, however, has indicated that the presence of SROs has not resulted in a reduction of school shooting severity, despite their increased prevalence. Rather, the type of firearm utilized in school shootings has been closely associated with the number of deaths and injuries (Lemieux, 2014 ; Livingston et al., 2019 ), suggesting implications for reconsideration of the kinds of firearms to which individuals have access.

Zero tolerance policies, though originally intended to curtail gun violence in schools, have expanded to cover a host of incidents (e.g., threats, bullying). Notwithstanding these intentions, these policies are generally ineffective in preventing school violence, including school shootings (American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force, 2008 ; Losinski et al., 2014 ), and have exacerbated the prevalence of youths’ interactions with law enforcement in schools. From the 2015–2016 to the 2017–2018 school years, there was a 5% increase in school-related arrests and a 12% increase in referrals to law enforcement (U.S. Department of Education, 2021 ); in 2017–18, about 230,000 students were referred to law enforcement and over 50,000 were arrested (The Center for Public Integrity, 2021 ). Law enforcement referrals have been a persistent concern aiding the school-to-prison pipeline, often involving non-criminal offenses and disproportionally affecting students from non-White backgrounds as well as students with disabilities (Chan et al., 2021 ; The Center for Public Integrity, 2021 ).

The consequences of these policies are thus far-reaching, with not only legal ramifications, but social-emotional and academic ones as well. For example, in 2017–2018, students missed 11,205,797 school days due to out-of-school suspensions during that school year (U.S. Department of Education, 2021 ), there were 96,492 corporal punishment incidents, and 101,990 students were physically restrained, mechanically restrained, or secluded (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, 2020 ). Such exclusionary and punitive measures have long-lasting consequences for the involved students, including academic underachievement, dropout, delinquency, and post-traumatic stress (e.g., Cholewa et al., 2018 ). Moreover, these consequences disproportionally affect culturally and linguistically diverse students and students with disabilities (Skiba et al., 2014 ; U.S. General Accountability Office, 2018 ), often resulting in great societal costs (Rumberger & Losen, 2017 ).

In the USA, mass killings involving guns occur approximately every 2 weeks, while school shootings occur every 4 weeks (Towers et al., 2015 ). Given the apparent and continued rise in gun violence, mass shootings, and school mass shootings, we aimed in this paper to reexamine rates of intentional firearm deaths, mass shootings, and school mass shootings in the USA using data from the past 5 years, 2017–2022, reappraising our analyses given the time that had passed since our earlier examination of the issue (Katsiyannis et al., 2018a , b ).

As noted in Katsiyannis et al., ( 2018a , b ), gun violence, mass shootings, and school shootings have been a part of the American way of life for generations. Such shootings have grown exponentially in both frequency and mortality rate since the 1980s. Using the same criteria applied in our previous work (Katsiyannis et al., 2018a , b ), we evaluated the frequency of shootings, mass shootings, and school mass school shootings from January 2017 through mid-July 2022. Extant data regarding shooting deaths from 2017 through 2020 were obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, utilizing the web-based injury statistics query and reporting system (WISQARS), and for school shootings from 2017 to 2022 from Everytown Research & Policy ( https://everytownresearch.org ), an independent non-profit organization that researches and communicates with policymakers and the public about gun violence in the USA. Intentional firearm death data were classified by age, as outlined in Katsiyannis et al., ( 2018a , b ), and the crude rate was calculated by dividing the number of deaths times 100,000, by the total population for each individual category.

The number of intentional firearm deaths and the crude death rates increased from 2017 to 2020 in all age categories. In absolute terms, the number of deaths rose from 14,496 in 2017 to 19,308 in 2020. In accord with this rise in the absolute number of deaths, crude death rates rose from 4.47 in 2017 to 5.88 in 2020. Table ​ Table2 2 provides the crude death rate in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, the most current years with data available. Figure  1 provides the raw number of deaths across the same time period.

Intentional firearm deaths across the USA (2017–2020)

Data obtained from WISQARS (2022)

Intentional firearm deaths across the USA (2017–2020). Note. Data obtained from WISQARS (2022)

As expected, in 2020, the number of fatal firearm injuries increased sharply from age 0–11 years, roughly elementary school age, to age 12–18 years, roughly middle school and high school age. Table ​ Table3 3 provides the crude death rates of children in 2020 who die from firearms. Males outnumbered females in every category of firearm deaths, including homicide, police violence, suicide, and accidental shootings, as well as for undetermined reasons for firearm discharge. Black males drastically surpassed all other children in the number of firearm deaths (2.91 per 100,000 0–11-year-olds; 57.10 per 100,000 12–18-year-olds). Also, notable is the high number of Black children 12–18 years killed by guns (32.37 per 100,000), followed by American Indian and Alaska Native children (18.87 per 100,000), in comparison to White children (12.40 per 100,000 children), Hispanic/Latinx children (8.16 per 100,000), and Asian and Pacific Islander children (2.95 per 100,000). A disproportionate number of gun deaths were also seen for Black girls relative to other girls (1.52 per 100,000 0–11-year-olds; 7.01 per 100,000 12–18-year-olds).

Fatal firearm injuries for children age 0–18 across the USA in 2020

  AN Alaska Native; – indicates 20 or fewer cases

Mass shootings and mass shooting deaths increased from 2017 to 2019, decreased in 2020, and then increased again in 2021. School shootings made a sharp decline in 2020—understandably so, given the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent government or locally mandated school shutdowns—but rose again sharply in 2021. Current rates reveal a continued increase, with numbers at the beginning of 2022 already exceeding those of 2017. School mass shooting counts were relatively low between 2017 through 2022, with four total during that time frame. Figure  2 provides raw numbers for mass shootings, school shootings, and school mass shootings from 2017 through 2022. Importantly, figures from the recent Uvalde, TX, school mass shooting at Robb Elementary School had not yet been recorded in the relevant databases at the time of this writing. With those deaths accounted for, 2022 is already the deadliest year for school mass shootings in the past 5 years.

Mass shootings, school shootings, and mass school shootings across the USA (2017–2022). Note. Data obtained from Everytown Research and Policy. Overlap present between all three categories

Gun violence in the USA, particularly mass shootings on the grounds of public schools, continues to be a pressing social and public health issue. Recent data suggest continued upward trends in school shootings, school mass shootings, and related deaths over the past 5 years—patterns that disturbingly mirror general gun violence and intentional shooting deaths in the USA across the same time period. The impacts on our nation’s youth are profound. Notably, gun violence disproportionately affects boys, especially Black boys, with much higher gun deaths per capita for this group than for any other group of youth. Likewise, Black girls are disproportionately affected compared to girls from other ethnic/racial groups. Moreover, while the COVID-19 pandemic and school shutdowns tempered gun violence in schools at least somewhat during the 2020 school year—including school shootings and school mass shootings—trend data show that gun violence rates are still continuing to rise. Indeed, gun violence deaths resulting from school shootings are at their highest recorded levels ever (Irwin et al., 2022 ).

Implications for Schools: Curbing School Violence

In recent years, the implementation of Multi-Tier Systems and Supports (MTSS), including Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and Response to Intervention (RTI), has resulted in improved school climate and student engagement as well as improved academic and behavioral outcomes (Elrod et al., 2022 ; Santiago-Rosario et al., 2022 ; National Center for Learning Disabilities, n.d.). Such approaches have implications for reducing school violence as well. PBIS uses a tiered framework intended to improve student behavioral and academic outcomes; it creates positive learning environments through the implementation of evidence-based instructional and behavioral interventions, guided by data-based decision-making and allocation of students across three tiers. In Tier 1, schools provide universal supports to all students in a proactive manner; in Tier 2, supports are aimed to students who need additional academic, behavioral, or social-emotional intervention; and in Tier 3, supports are provided in an intensive and individualized manner (Lewis et al., 2010 ). The implementation of PBIS has resulted in an improved school climate, fewer office referrals, and reductions in out-of-school suspensions (Bradshaw et al., 2010 ; Elrod et al.,  2010 , 2022 ; Gage et al., 2018a , 2018b ; Horner et al., 2010 ; Noltemeyer et al., 2019 ). Likewise, RTI aims to improve instructional outcomes through high-quality instruction and universal screening for students to identify learning challenges and similarly allocates students across three tiers. In Tier 1, schools implement high-quality classroom instruction, screening, and group interventions; in Tier 2, schools implement targeted interventions; and in Tier 3, schools implement intensive interventions and comprehensive evaluation (National Center for Learning Disabilities, n.d ). RTI implementation has resulted in improved academic outcomes (e.g., reading, writing) (Arrimada et al., 2022 ; Balu et al., 2015 ; Siegel, 2020 ) and enhanced school climate and student behavior.

In order to support students’ well-being, enhance school climate, and support reductions in behavioral issues and school violence, schools should consider the implementation of MTSS, reducing reliance on exclusionary and aversive measures such as zero tolerance policies, seclusion and restraints, corporal punishment, or school-based law enforcement referrals and arrests (see Gage et al., in press ). Such approaches and policies are less effective than the use of MTSS, exacerbate inequities and enhance disproportionality (particularly for youth of color and students with disabilities), and have not been shown to reduce violence in schools.

Implications for Students: Ensuring Physical Safety and Supporting Mental Health

Students should not have to attend school and fear becoming victims of violence in general, no less gun violence in particular. Schools must ensure the physical safety of their students. Yet, as the substantial number of school shootings continues to rise in the USA, so too does concern about the adverse impacts of violence and gun violence on students’ mental health and well-being. Students are frequently exposed to unavoidable and frightening images and stories of school violence (Child Development Institute, n.d. ) and are subject to active shooter drills that may not actually be effective and, in some cases, may actually induce trauma (Jetelina, 2022 ; National Association of School Psychologists & National Association of School Resources Officers, 2021 ; Wang et al., 2020 ). In turn, students struggle to process and understand why these events happen and, more importantly, how they can be prevented (National Association of School Psychologists, 2015 ). School personnel should be prepared to support the mental health needs of students, both in light of the prevalence of school gun violence and in the aftermath of school mass shootings.

Research provides evidence that traumatic events, such as school mass shootings, can and do have mental health consequences for victims and members of affected communities, leading to an increase in post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression, and other psychological systems (Lowe & Galea, 2017 ). At the same time, high media attention to such events indirectly exposes and heightens feelings of fear, anxiety, and vulnerability in students—even if they did not attend the school where the shooting occurred (Schonfeld & Demaria, 2020 ). Students of all ages may experience adjustment difficulties and engage in avoidance behaviors (Schonfeld & Demaria, 2020 ). As a result, school personnel may underestimate a student’s distress after a shooting and overestimate their resilience. In addition, an adult’s difficulty adjusting in the wake of trauma may also threaten a student’s sense of well-being because they may believe their teachers cannot provide them with the protection they need to remain safe in school (Schonfeld & Demaria, 2020 ).

These traumatic events have resounding consequences for youth development and well-being. However, schools continue to struggle to meet the demands of student mental health needs as they lack adequate funding for resources, student support services, and staff to provide the level of support needed for many students (Katsiyannis et al., 2018a ). Despite these limiting factors, children and youth continue to look to adults for information and guidance on how to react to adverse events. An effective response can significantly decrease the likelihood of further trauma; therefore, all school personnel must be prepared to talk with students about their fears, to help them feel safe and establish a sense of normalcy and security in the wake of tragedy (National Association of School Psychologists, 2016 ). Research suggests a number of strategies can be utilized by educators, school leaders, counselors, and other mental health professionals to support the students and staff they serve.

Recommendations for Educators

The National Association of School Psychologists ( 2016 ) recommends the following practices for educators to follow in response to school mass shootings. Although a complex topic to address, the issue needs to be acknowledged. In particular, educators should designate time to talk with their students about the event, and should reassure students that they are safe while validating their fears, feelings, and concerns. Recognizing and stressing to students that all feelings are okay when a tragedy occurs is essential. It is important to note that some students do not wish to express their emotions verbally. Other developmentally appropriate outlets, such as drawing, writing, reading books, and imaginative play, can be utilized. Educators should also provide developmentally appropriate explanations of the issue and events throughout their conversations. At the elementary level, students need brief, simple answers that are balanced with reassurances that schools are safe and that adults are there to protect them. In the secondary grades, students may be more vocal in asking questions about whether they are truly safe and what protocols are in place to protect them at school. To address these questions, educators can provide information related to the efforts of school and community leaders to ensure school safety. Educators should also review safety procedures and help students to identify at least one adult in the building to whom they can go if they feel threatened or at risk. Limiting exposure to media and social media is also important, as developmentally inappropriate information can cause anxiety or confusion. Educators should also maintain a normal routine by keeping a regular school schedule.

Recommendations for School Leaders

Superintendents, principals, and other school administrative personnel are looked upon to provide leadership and comfort to staff, students, and parents during a tragedy. Reassurance can be provided by reiterating safety measures and student supports that are in place in their district and school (The National Association of School Psychologists, 2015 ). The NASP recommends the following practices for school leaders regarding addressing student mental health needs directly. First, school leaders should be a visible, welcoming presence by greeting students and visiting classrooms. School leaders should also communicate with the school community, including parents and students, about their efforts to maintain safe and caring schools through clear behavioral expectations, positive behavior interventions and supports, and crisis planning preparedness. This can include the development of press releases for broad dissemination within the school community. School leaders should also provide crisis training and professional development for staff, based upon assessments of needs and targeted toward identified knowledge or skill gaps. They should also ensure the implementation of violence prevention programs and curricula in school and review school safety policies and procedures to ensure that all safety issues are adequately covered in current school crisis plans and emergency response procedures.

Recommendations for Counselors and Mental Health Professionals

School counselors offer critical assistance to their buildings’ populations as they experience crises or respond to emergencies (American School Counselor Association, 2019 ; Brown, 2020 ). Two models that stand out in the literature utilized by counselors in the wake of violent events are the Preparation, Action, Recovery (PAR) model and the Prevent and prepare; Reaffirm; Evaluate; provide interventions and Respond (PREPaRE) model. PREPaRE is the only comprehensive, nationally available training curriculum created by educators for educators (The National Association of School Psychologists, n.d. ). Although beneficial, neither the PAR nor PREPaRE model directly addresses school counselors’ responses to school shootings when their school is directly affected (Brown, 2020 ). This led to the development of the School Counselor’s Response to School Shootings-Framework of Recommendations (SCRSS-FR) model, which includes six stages, each of which has corresponding components for school counselors who have lived through a school mass shooting. Each of these models provides the necessary training to school-employed mental health professionals on how to best fill the roles and responsibilities generated by their membership on school crisis response teams (The National Association of School Psychologists, n.d. ).

Other Implications: Federal and State Policy

Recent events at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, prompted the US Congress to pass landmark legislation intended to curb gun violence, enhancing background checks for prospective gun buyers who are under 21 years of age as well as allowing examination of juvenile records beginning at age 16, including health records related to prospective gun buyers’ mental health. Additionally, this legislation provides funding that will allow states to implement “red flag laws” and other intervention programs while also strengthening laws related to the purchase and trafficking of guns (Cochrane, 2022 ). Yet, additional legislation reducing or eliminating access to assault rifles and other guns with large capacity magazines, weapons that might easily be deemed “weapons of mass destruction,” is still needed (Interdisciplinary Group on Preventing School & Community Violence, 2022 ; see also Flannery et al., 2021 ). In 2019, the US Congress started to appropriate research funding to support research on gun violence, with $25 million in equal shares provided on an annual basis from both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health (Roubein, 2022 ; Wan, 2019 ). Additional research is, of course, still needed.

Despite legislative progress, and while advancements in gun legislation are meaningful and have the potential to aid in the reduction of gun violence in the USA, school shootings and school mass shootings are something schools and students will contend with in the months and years ahead. This reality has serious implications for schools and for students, points that need serious consideration. Therefore, it is imperative that gun violence is framed as a pressing national public health issue deserving attention, with drastic steps needed to curb access to assault rifles and guns with high-capacity magazines, based on extensive and targeted research. As noted, Congress, after many years of inaction, has started to appropriate funds to address this issue. However, the level of funding is still minimal in light of the pressing challenge that gun violence presents. Furthermore, the messaging of conservative media, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and republican legislators framing access to all and any weapons—including assault rifles—as a constitutional right under the second amendment bears scrutiny. Indeed, the second amendment denotes that “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Security of the nation is arguably the intent of the amendment, an intent that is clearly violated as evidenced in the ever-increasing death toll associated with gun violence in the USA.

Whereas federal legislation would be preferable, the possibility of banning assault weapons is remote (in light of recent Congressional action). Similarly, state action has been severely curtailed in light of the US Supreme Court’s decision regarding New York state law. However, data on gun fatalities and injuries, the correspondence of gun violence to laws regulating access across the world and states, and failed security measures such as armed guards posted in schools (e.g., Robb Elementary School) must be consistently emphasized. Additionally, the widespread sense of immunity for gun manufacturers should be tested in the same manner that tobacco manufacturers and opioid pharmaceuticals have been. The success against such tobacco and opioid manufacturers, once unthinkable, is a powerful precedent to consider for how the threat of gun violence against public health might be addressed.

Author Contribution

AK conceived of and designed the study and led the writing of the manuscript. LJR collaborated on the study design, contributed to the writing of the study, and contributed to the editing of the final manuscript. DKW analyzed the data and wrote up the results. SNS contributed to the writing of the study.

Declarations

The authors declare no competing interests.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

• American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force Are zero tolerance policies effective in the schools? An evidentiary review and recommendations. The American Psychologist. 2008; 63 (9):852–862. doi: 10.1037/0003-066x.63.9.852. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• American School Counselor Association (2019). ASCA national model: A framework for school counseling programs (4th edn.). Alexandria, VA: Author.
• Arrimada M, Torrance M, Fidalgo R. Response to intervention in first-grade writing instruction: A large-scale feasibility study. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 2022; 35 (4):943–969. doi: 10.1007/s11145-021-10211-z. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Balu, R., Zhu, P., Doolittle, F., Schiller, E., Jenkins, J., & Gersten, R. (2015). Evaluation of response to intervention practices for elementary school reading (NCEE 2016–4000). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.
• Bradshaw CP, Mitchell MM, Leaf PJ. Examining the effects of schoolwide positive behavioral interventions and supports on student outcomes: Results from a randomized controlled effectiveness trial in elementary schools. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions. 2010; 12 (3):133–148. doi: 10.1177/1098300709334798. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Brown CH. School counselors’ response to school shootings: Framework of recommendations. Journal of Educational Research and Practice. 2020; 10 (1):18. doi: 10.5590/jerap.2020.10.1.18. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cabral, M., Kim, B., Rossin-Slater, M., Schnell, M., & Schwandt, H. (2021). Trauma at school: The impacts of shootings on students’ human capital and economic outcomes. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved June 21, 2022, from  https://www.nber.org/papers/w28311
• Chan P, Katsiyannis A, Yell M. Handcuffed in school: Legal and practice considerations. Advances in Neurodevelopmental Disorders. 2021; 5 (3):339–350. doi: 10.1007/s41252-021-00213-x. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Child Development Institute. (n.d.). How to talk to kids about violence. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from  https://childdevelopmentinfo.com/how-to-be-a-parent/communication/talk-to-kids-violence/
• Cholewa B, Hull MF, Babcock CR, Smith AD. Predictors and academic outcomes associated with in-school suspension. School Psychology Quarterly. 2018; 33 (2):191–199. doi: 10.1037/spq0000213. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cochrane, E. (2022). Congress passes bipartisan gun legislation, clearing it for Biden. The New York Times. Retrieved July 27, 2022 from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/us/politics/gun-control-bill-congress.html
• Elrod BG, Rice KG, Bradshaw CP, Mitchell MM, Leaf PJ. Examining the effects of schoolwide positive behavioral interventions and supports on student outcomes: Results from a randomized controlled effectiveness trial in elementary schools. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions. 2010; 12 (3):133–148. doi: 10.1177/1098300709334798. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Elrod BG, Rice KG, Meyers J. PBIS fidelity, school climate, and student discipline: A longitudinal study of secondary schools. Psychology in the Schools. 2022; 59 (2):376–397. doi: 10.1002/pits.22614. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Everytown Research & Policy. (2021a). Keeping our schools safe: A plan for preventing mass shootings and ending all gun violence in American schools. Retrieved July 17, 2022, from https://everytownresearch.org/report/preventing-gun-violence-in-american-schools/
• Everytown Research & Policy. (2021b). The impact of gun violence on children and teens. Retrieved, June 21, 2022, from https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-gun-violence-on-children-and-teens/
• Everytown Research & Policy. (2022a). Gun law rankings. Retrieved July 19, 2022, from https://everytownresearch.org/rankings/
• Everytown Research & Policy. (2022b). Gunfire on school grounds in the United States. Retrieved July 19, 2022, from https://everytownresearch.org/maps/gunfire-on-school-grounds/
• Finkelhor D, Turner HA, Shattuck AM, Hamby SL. Violence, crime, and abuse exposure in a national sample of children and youth: An update. JAMA Pediatrics. 2013; 167 (7):614–621. doi: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2013.42. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Flannery, D. J., Fox, J. A., Wallace, L., Mulvey, E., & Modzeleski, W. (2021). Guns, school shooters, and school safety: What we know and directions for change. School Psychology Review, 50 (2-3), 237–253.
• Gage NA, Lee A, Grasley-Boy N, Peshak GH. The impact of school-wide positive behavior interventions and supports on school suspensions: A statewide quasi-experimental analysis. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions. 2018; 20 (4):217–226. doi: 10.1177/1098300718768204. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gage, N. A., Rapa, L. J., Whitford, D. K., & Katsiyannis, A. (Eds.) (in press). Disproportionality and social justice in education . Springer
• Gage N, Whitford DK, Katsiyannis A. A review of schoolwide positive behavior interventions and supports as a framework for reducing disciplinary exclusions. The Journal of Special Education. 2018; 52 :142–151. doi: 10.1272/74060629214686796178874678. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gun Violence Archive. (2022a). Gun violence archives 2021. Retrieved June 23, 2022, from https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls
• Gun Violence Archive. (2022b). Charts and maps. Retrieved June 23, 2022, from  https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
• Horner RH, Sugai G, Anderson CM. Examining the evidence base for schoolwide positive behavior support. Focus on Exceptional Children. 2010; 42 (8):1–14. doi: 10.17161/fec.v42i18.6906. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Interdisciplinary Group on Preventing School and Community Violence. (2022). Call for action to prevent gun violence in the United States of America. Retrieved July 15, 2022, from https://www.dropbox.com/s/006naaah5be23qk/2022%20Call%20To%20Action%20Press%20Release%20and%20Statement%20COMBINED%205-27-22.pdf?dl=0
• Irwin, V., Wang, K., Cui, J., & Thompson, A. (2022). Report on indicators of school crime and safety: 2021 (NCES 2022–092/NCJ 304625). National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, and Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Washington, DC. Retrieved July 21, 2022 from https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2022092
• Jetelina, K. (2022). Firearms: What you can do right now. Retrieved July 15, 2022, from https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/firearms-what-you-can-do-right-now
• Katsiyannis A, Whitford D, Ennis R. Historical examination of United States school mass shootings in the 20 th and 21 st centuries: Implications for students, schools, and society. Journal of Child and Family Studies. 2018; 27 :2562–2573. doi: 10.1007/s10826-018-1096-2. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Katsiyannis A, Whitford D, Ennis R. Firearm violence across the lifespan: Relevance and theoretical impact on child and adolescent educational prospects. Journal of Child and Family Studies. 2018; 27 :1748–1762. doi: 10.1007/s10826-018-1035-2. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kellermann AL, Rivara FP. Silencing the science on gun research. Journal of the American Medical Association. 2013; 309 (6):549–550. doi: 10.1001/jama.2012.208207. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lemieux F. Effect of gun culture and firearm laws on firearm violence and mass shootings in the United States: A multi-level quantitative analysis. International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences. 2014; 9 (1):74–93. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lewis T, Jones S, Horner R, Sugai G. School-wide positive behavior support and students with emotional/behavioral disorders: Implications for prevention, identification and intervention. Exceptionality. 2010; 18 :82–93. doi: 10.1080/09362831003673168. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Livingston MD, Rossheim ME, Stidham-Hall K. A descriptive analysis of school and school shooter characteristics and the severity of school shootings in the United States, 1999–2018. Journal of Adolescent Health. 2019; 64 (6):797–799. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2018.12.006. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Losinski M, Katsiyannis A, Ryan J, Baughan C. Weapons in schools and zero-tolerance policies. NASSP Bulletin. 2014; 98 (2):126–141. doi: 10.1177/0192636514528747. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lowe SR, Galea S. The mental health consequences of mass shootings. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. 2017; 18 (1):62–82. doi: 10.1177/1524838015591572. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• National Association of School Psychologists. (n.d.). About PREPaRE. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.nasponline.org/professional-development/prepare-training-curriculum/aboutprepare#:~:text=Specifically%2C%20the%20PREPaRE,E%E2%80%94Evaluate%20psychological%20trauma%20risk
• National Association of School Psychologists. (2015). Responding to school violence: Tips for administrators. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/resources-and-podcasts/school-safety-and-crisis/school-violence-resources/school-violence-prevention/responding-to-school-violence-tips-for-administrators
• National Association of School Psychologists. (2016). Talking to children about violence: Tips for parents and teachers. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/resources-and-podcasts/school-safety-and-crisis/school-violence-resources/talking-to-children-about-violence-tips-for-parents-and-teachers
• National Association of School Psychologists & National Association of School Resource Officers (2021). Best practice considerations for armed assailant drills in schools. Bethesda, MD: Author. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/resources-and-podcasts/school-safety-and-crisis/systems-level-prevention/best-practice-considerations-for-armed-assailant-drills-in-schools
• National Center for Learning Disabilities. (n.d.). What is RTI? Retrieved July 21, 2022 from http://www.rtinetwork.org/learn/what/whatisrti
• New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 20–843. (United States Supreme Court, 2021). Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-843_7j80.pdf
• Noltemeyer A, Palmer K, James AG, Wiechman S. School-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports (SWPBIS): A synthesis of existing research. International Journal of School & Educational Psychology. 2019; 7 :253–262. doi: 10.1080/21683603.2018.1425169. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pew Research Center. (2022). What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S. Retrieved June 21, 2022 from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
• Puzzanchera, C. (2021). Juvenile arrests, 2019 . U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs. Juvenile Justice Statistics National Report Series Bulletin. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/publications/juvenile-arrests-2019.pdf
• Roubein, R. (2022). Now the government is funding gun violence research, but it’s years behind. The Washington Post. Retrieved July 17, 2022 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/26/now-government-is-funding-gun-violence-research-it-years-behind/
• Rowhani-Rahbar A, Moe C. School shootings in the U.S.: What is the state of evidence? Journal of Adolescent Health. 2019; 64 (6):683–684. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2019.03.016. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rumberger, R. W., & Losen, D. J. (2017). The hidden costs of California’s harsh school discipline: And the localized economic benefits from suspending fewer high school students . California Dropout Research Project : The Civil Rights Project. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/resources/projects/center-for-civil-rights-remedies/school-to-prison-folder/summary-reports/the-hidden-cost-of-californias-harsh-discipline/CostofSuspensionReportFinal-corrected-030917.pdf
• Sandoval, E. (2022). Inside a Uvalde classroom: A taunting gunman and 78 minutes of terror. The New York Times. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/10/us/uvalde-injured-teacher-reyes.html
• Santiago-Rosario, M. R., McIntosh, K., & Payno-Simmons, R. (2022). Centering equity within the PBIS framework: Overview and evidence of effectiveness. Center on PBIS, University of Oregon. Retrieved July 27, 2022 from www.pbis.org
• Schonfeld DJ, Demaria T. Supporting children after school shootings. Pediatric Clinics. 2020; 67 (2):397–411. doi: 10.1016/j.pcl.2019.12.006. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Skiba RJ, Arredondo MI, Williams NT. More than a metaphor: The contribution of exclusionary discipline to a school-to-prison pipeline. Equity & Excellence in Education. 2014; 47 (4):546–564. doi: 10.1080/10665684.2014.958965. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Siegel LS. Early identification and intervention to prevent reading failure: A response to Intervention (RTI) initiative. Educational and Developmental Psychologist. 2020; 37 (2):140–146. doi: 10.1017/edp.2020.21. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• The Center for Public Integrity. (2021). When schools call police on kids. Retrieved June 21, 2022 from https://publicintegrity.org/education/criminalizing-kids/police-in-schools-disparities/
• Towers S, Gomez-Lievano A, Khan M, Mubayi A, Castillo-Chavez C. Contagion in mass killings and school shootings. PLoS One. 2015; 10 (7):e0117259. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0117259. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• U. S. Department of Education. (2021). An overview of exclusionary discipline practices in public schools for the 2017–18 school year . Civil Rights Data Collection. Retrieved June 21, 2022, from https://ocrdata.ed.gov/estimations/2017-2018
• U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights. (2020). 2017–18 civil rights data collection: The use of restraint and seclusion in children with disabilities in K-12 schools. Retrieved July 27, 2022 from https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/restraint-and-seclusion.pdf
• U.S. General Accountability Office (2018). K-12 education: Discipline disparities for Black students, boys, and students with disabilities (GAO-18–258). Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-18-258
• Wan, W. (2019). Congressional deal could fund gun violence research for first time since 1990s. The Washington Post. Retrieved July 17, 2022 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/12/16/congressional-deal-could-fund-gun-violence-research-first-time-since-s/
• Wang, K., Chen, Y., Zhang, J., & Oudekerk, B. A. (2020). Indicators of school crime and safety: 2019 (NCES 2020–063/NCJ 254485). National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, and Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved July 27, 2022, from https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020063-temp.pdf
• Washington Post. (2022). The Washington Post’s database of school shootings. Retrieved June 21, 2022 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-shootings-database/

School shootings, race, and the media: a content analysis of podcasts on school shootings

Files and links (1).

Cookie Preference Center

Your preferences, strictly necessary cookies.

As described in our Corporate Privacy Notice and Cookie Policy , we use cookies (including pixels or other similar technologies) on our websites, mobile applications and related products (the “services”). The types of cookies we use are described below.​

These are cookies necessary for the services to function and are always active. They are usually only set in response to actions made by the user which amount to a request for services, such as setting privacy preferences, logging in, or filling in forms. ​

Cookie List

School shootings, race, and the media: a content analysis of podcasts on school shootings

• Masters Thesis
• Kekahu, Malissa N.
• Shigihara, Amanda
• Brooks, Jackie
• Sociology Department
• California State University, Sacramento
• school shootings
• social constructionism
• oai:alma.01CALS_USL:11245545180001671
• http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12741/rep:2242

Items in ScholarWorks are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

College Essays Should Be Personal. For School-Shooting Survivors, the Question Is How Personal.

A generation of American students has become tragically familiar with mass shootings. Many of them describe the life-changing experiences in their college applications.

By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Patricia Mazzei

To make their college admissions essays stand out, high school students have always written about their biggest personal hardships. For those who have survived mass shootings, ducking under desks and witnessing unspeakable horror, the big question is whether to recount the bloodshed to get into college.

With school shootings now a part of the fabric of America, college admissions officers regularly find the tragedies they watched unfold on television being grappled with in the pages of the applications before them.

Students recall their terror. They describe their transformation from quiet pupil to outspoken activist. For those who are willing to relive those awful days — and not all survivors are — the tragedies are life-changing.

We Want to Hear From Students Affected by Mass Shootings

“I kind of struggled with that a little bit, because I never really knew what colleges would look for,” said Taylor Ferrante-Markham, who graduated this spring from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. But then she learned admissions officers liked to see evidence of personal growth.

“Of course, it was the first thing that popped into my head,” she said of the February 2018 massacre at her school, which left 17 people dead and another 17 wounded. She applied only to St. John’s University in New York — her dream college, she said — and edited her essay until she felt it was good enough to win her acceptance.

It did. Ms. Ferrante-Markham, 18, said she plans to study journalism and criminology.

Writing about that day has become a little easier over time, she said. Her essay recounts her feeling of apathy before the shooting and how the massacre angered her and made her look outside her own circumstances.

“I now care about much more than just my little world around me,” she wrote.

I hated waking up for school and going to any class that challenged me. My only concerns were my friends and our afterschool plans, boys, and how far away the next holiday break was. I did not care about what was happening in my community, my state, or even my country. All I wanted to do was finish my spreads for yearbook and go home or out. That is pretty much how my life went throughout the majority of high school. I was never expecting anything to change, that was, until February 14, 2018. … I did my research, which showed nothing has been changed to protect students. So I decided to walk in the March For Our Lives in Parkland with my friends, for our safety, to make change. I now care about much more than just my little world around me. I am ready to move forward onto my next chapter, furthering my education, bringing my new desire for change wherever I go throughout college, into my future career, and for the rest of my life.

The majority of college-bound students from Stoneman Douglas who were juniors at the time of the mass shooting wrote about it in their college admission essays, according to Sarah Lerner, an English and journalism teacher at the school who taught many of those students in their senior year.

“Some of the kids didn’t want to write about the event because it was too much already, but others did, because it truly shaped them and they wanted to talk about it,” said Ms. Lerner, who compiled stories from shooting survivors into a book called “Parkland Speaks.” “I was very honest with them. I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it. If you don’t, don’t. Nobody is going to accept you because you write about it or not.’”

One Stoneman Douglas student who wrote about surviving the massacre was accepted to Harvard in the spring, only to have his acceptance rescinded this week because of racist screeds he wrote months before the shooting.

Another, Spencer Blum, who moved into his freshman dorm at the University of South Florida on Tuesday, wrote about his fear on the day the shooting unfolded, when he initially struggled to get hold of his sister, a freshman at the school who was not hurt.

Mr. Blum, now 18, said in his essay that Feb. 14, 2018, was “the day I would become an activist.”

As we kept walking down this narrowing path behind the school, things started to become suspicious. For starters, we were still going; it seemed a bit over the top for a drill. Then, a cop car pulled up behind us on the field and came out in a full bulletproof suit and with an extremely long rifle. As some students began crying and screaming “THIS IS REAL!” the thought that this was just a drill began to fade. … Every morning I wake up and think “what if it was me?” Then, I think about how it could have been me. … That’s why I lobbied in Tallahassee. That’s why I marched for my life. So I can wake up, hug my mom, dad, brother, and sister, an not worry about how it could have been me.

At Great Mills High School in southern Maryland, Alana White said she heard gunshots on the day in March 2018 when a 17-year-old student at the school fatally shot his ex-girlfriend and injured another student before killing himself.

Those memories came back months later as she wrote her college essay, focusing on the events that had shaped her view of her hometown. She wrote about suddenly not feeling safe in the tree-lined rural community where she had grown up, and about attending protests and rallies and working on a memorial mural.

“Whenever something bad happens in my life I tend to keep it in and not talk about it,” said Ms. White, who is heading to Brown University next fall. “I’m not the type of person who shares my problems with the world. Writing it down helped me come to terms with what I was actually feeling.”

My hands wouldn’t stop shaking for the whole day. I suddenly didn’t feel safe in the one place where I had spent so much time, where I had met some of my best mentors, where I had spent so long working towards my passions. Where a bright girl’s life had ended. My doubts resurfaced. But my community helped pull me up. Through our protests and rallies for unity, I realized I loved my school more than I ever thought I could, and that there was nowhere I would have rather become the person I am.

Imprints of school shootings are visible in other writings by student survivors, even after they arrive on college campuses.

At Northern Kentucky University, Mo Cox, 19, decided to write an essay for her freshman creative writing class about the day in January 2018 when a teenage gunman killed two classmates at Marshall County High School in rural western Kentucky .

“It was supposed to be 1,000 words, but I went over,” Ms. Cox said. “I kept writing. I just had to get all this out.”

She said she wanted to help other people understand the initial waves of shock and heartbreak, but also the lesser-discussed echoes of trauma: How she failed Algebra III, for the first time. The frustration of getting nowhere with calls for tougher gun laws. How people just stopped talking about what had happened.

Patricia Greer, the principal of Marshall County High, said that when they were applying to colleges, many of her students chose to tell admissions officers about their community’s success, not just its tragedy.

“We don’t want to be defined by the shooting, and our students don’t either, so a lot of times that’s not what they choose to share,” Ms. Greer said. “They’re proud of their school, they’re proud of the community for their resilience, but that’s not something they want to be defined by.”

Rachel Blundell, the principal of Santa Fe High School in Texas, said this year’s graduating class worked hard to reclaim their senior year after a 17-year-old shot and killed 10 students at the school in May 2018 .

In her letters recommending seniors for college admission and scholarships this year, the first since the shooting, Ms. Blundell has made sure to mention their resilience. She said she has written about how student council members looked out for younger students. How the football team returned to the practice field just a few months after two players were killed. How students packed this year’s prom.

Jim Jump, a former president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the author of a weekly column on the ethics of admission, said he hopes admissions officers will not become numb to students’ pain.

“As more kids, unfortunately, encounter that kind of experience,” he said of school shootings, “I worry that college people will lose sight of the individual that’s behind that essay.”

Jack Healy contributed reporting.

Patricia Mazzei is the Miami bureau chief, covering Florida and Puerto Rico. Before joining The Times, she was the political writer for The Miami Herald. She was born and raised in Venezuela, and is bilingual in Spanish. More about Patricia Mazzei

Gun Violence in America

Background Checks Expansion: The Biden administration has approved the broadest expansion of federal background checks in decades to regulate a fast-growing shadow market  of weapons sold online, at gun shows and through private sellers that contributes to gun violence.

A Grieving Mother’s Hope: Katy Dieckhaus, whose daughter was killed in the 2023 Covent School shooting in Nashville, is pleading for compromise with those who see gun rights as sacred .

A Historic Case: On Feb. 6, an American jury convicted a parent for a mass shooting carried out by their child for the first time. Lisa Miller, a reporter who has been following the case since its beginning, explains what the verdict really means .

Echoing Through School Grounds: In a Rhode Island city, gunshots from AR-15-style weapons have become the daily soundtrack for a school within 500 yards of a police shooting range. Parents are terrified, and children have grown accustomed to the threat of violence .

The Emotional Toll: We asked Times readers how the threat of gun violence has affected the way they lead their lives. Here’s what they told us .

Gun Control: U.S. gun laws are at the center of heated exchanges between those in favor and against tougher regulations. Here’s what to know about that debate .

The lasting consequences of school shootings on the students who survive them

Associate Professor of Health Policy, Stanford University

PhD candidate in economics, The University of Texas at Austin

Assistant Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, Northwestern University

Associate Professor of Economics, The University of Texas at Austin

Assistant Professor of Economics, Northwestern University

Disclosure statement

Maya Rossin-Slater receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01HD102378, as well as the National Science Foundation CAREER award No. 1752203.

Bokyung Kim receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01HD102378.

Hannes Schwandt receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01HD102378.

Marika Cabral receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01HD102378.

Molly Schnell receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01HD102378.

View all partners

As the U.S. reels from another school shooting, much of the public discussion has centered on the lives lost: 19 children and two adults. Indeed, the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde , Texas is the second deadliest such incident on record, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

Since the Columbine massacre in 1999 in which two teenagers killed a dozen students and one teacher , at least 185 children, educators and others have been killed by gun violence at American schools, according to figures compiled by The Washington Post .

But this death toll captures only one part of the immense cost of gun violence in American schools. We have studied the long-term effects of school shootings on the health, education and economic futures of those who survive such incidents. Our research shows that despite often escaping without physical harm, the hundreds of thousands of children and educators who survive these tragedies carry scars that affect their lives for many years to come.

Deterioration in mental health

In a 2020 study , we analyzed 44 school shootings that took place in the U.S. between 2008 and 2013 to assess the impact the incidents had on students’ mental health. Using a unique data set documenting antidepressant prescriptions in the surrounding areas, we found that antidepressant use among youth near schools that experienced shootings increased by over 20% following the event.

This increased usage of antidepressants persisted for over three years after the shooting, indicating that the deterioration in mental health among local adolescents was not temporary.

The effects were more pronounced when the school shootings included fatalities, suggesting that events like the massacre in Uvalde are likely to result in long-lasting health effects on survivors that extend beyond the physical injuries some have received.

Educational and economic trajectories

But the mental health impacts of mass school shootings tell only part of the story. While deadly massacres like the one in Uvalde receive widespread media and public attention, many more acts of gun violence at schools are less fatal and less highly publicized. Indeed, figures from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security show that in 2021 alone there were 240 incidents in which a gun was either brandished or used in a school.

Of all shootings that took place at U.S. schools in 2018 and 2019, nearly three-quarters had no fatalities . But that doesn’t mean they don’t have an impact.

To assess their effects, we studied fatal and non-fatal school shootings in Texas – taking a wider lens and considering acts of gun violence that frequently take place at schools but are unlikely to make national news.

Between 1995 and 2016, 33 Texas public schools experienced a shooting on school grounds during school hours – some schools had more than one.

Using detailed educational and labor market data, we compared the trajectories of students at schools that experienced shootings with those of students at schools that were similar in terms of institutional and student characteristics, such as demographic makeup and percentage of students from low-income backgrounds. But the comparison group of schools did not have a shotting over our study period.

We found that students who had been exposed to a shooting at school were more likely to be chronically absent and to be held back a grade in the two years after the event.

They were also significantly less likely to graduate high school, go to or graduate from college. The impacts extended into their early adult life. In their mid 20s, they were less likely to be employed and had lower earnings than their peers who had not been exposed to a shooting at school.

Eighteen of the 33 shootings we included in the study resulted in no fatalities, and no shootings resulted in more than one death. Yet, the negative impacts on people’s lives were profound. Our results reveal that each student exposed to a shooting could expect to earn US$115,550 less over the course of their lifetime.

Living with the consequences

The tragedy of the lives lost to gun violence in America’s schools cannot be overstated. But the data indicate that even those who escape these horrific events alive and without physical injuries are also victims.

These adverse impacts are observed in students exposed to mass shootings, but also the more routine acts of gun violence in schools that rarely make the news. With an average of nearly 50,000 American students experiencing an act of gun violence at their school annually in recent years, our findings suggest that the aggregate costs of school gun violence in terms of lost lifetime earnings is nearly $5.8 billion. The full costs in terms of detriment to the mental health of tens of thousands of young people is harder to quantify.

So as we mourn the 21 lives lost in Uvalde, we must not forget about the hundreds of other students who were at the school that day. These students will be forced to live with the consequences of what happened for decades to come.

• Mental health
• Antidepressants
• Sandy Hook shootings
• US education
• Mass shootings
• School shootings
• Gun culture
• Uvalde shooting

Faculty of Law - Academic Appointment Opportunities

Operations Manager

Senior Education Technologist

Audience Development Coordinator (fixed-term maternity cover)

Lecturer (Hindi-Urdu)

The Impact of School Shootings on American Students: A Research Paper and a Play

Journal title, journal issn, volume title, description, collections.

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Five Facts About Mass Shootings in K-12 Schools

Preventing mass shootings in the United States, particularly those occurring in school settings, is an important priority for families, government leaders and officials, public safety agencies, mental health professionals, educators, and local communities. What does the evidence say about how to detect, prevent, and respond to these tragic events? Here’s what we’ve learned through NIJ-sponsored research: [1]

1. Most people who commit a mass shooting are in crisis leading up to it and are likely to leak their plans to others, presenting opportunities for intervention.

Before their acts of violence, most individuals who carry out a K-12 mass shooting show outward signs of crisis. Through social media and other means, they often publicly broadcast a high degree of personal instability and an inability to cope in their current mental state. Almost all are actively suicidal.

Case studies show that most of these individuals engage in warning behaviors, usually leaking their plans directly to peers or through social media. [2] Yet most leaks of K-12 mass shooting plans are not reported to authorities before the shooting.

Research shows that leaking mass shooting plans is associated with a cry for help. [3] Analyses of case reports from successfully averted K-12 mass shootings point to crisis intervention as a promising strategy for K-12 mass shooting prevention. [4] Programs and strategies found to prevent school shootings and school violence generally could hold promise for preventing school mass shootings as well.

2. Everyone can help prevent school mass shootings.

Most individuals who carry out a K-12 mass shooting are insiders, with some connection to the school they target. Often, they are current or former students.

Research suggests that communities can help prevent school mass shootings by working together to address student crises and trauma, recognizing and reporting threats of violence, and following up consistently.

Two-thirds of foiled plots in all mass shootings (including school mass shootings) are detected through public reporting. Having a mechanism in place to collect information on threats of possible school violence and thwarted attempts is a good first step.

The School Safety Tip Line Toolkit is one resource to consider for developing and implementing a school tip line. [5] The Mass Attacks Defense Toolkit details evidence-based suggestions for recognizing warning signs and creating collaborative systems to follow up consistently in each case. [6] The Averted School Violence Database enables schools to share details about averted school violence incidents and lessons learned that can prevent future acts of violence. [7]

3. Threat assessment is a promising prevention strategy to assess and respond to mass shooting threats, as well as other threats of violence by students.

For schools that adopt threat assessment protocols, school communities are educated to assess threats of violence reported to them. [8] Threat assessment teams, including school officials, mental health personnel, and law enforcement, respond to each threat as warranted by the circumstances. An appropriate response might include referral of a student to mental health professionals, involvement of law enforcement, or both.

Emphasizing the mental health needs of students who pose threats can encourage their student peers to report on those threats without fear of being stigmatized as a “snitch.” In an evaluation study, educating students on this distinction increased their willingness to report threats. [9]

Many educational and public safety experts agree that threat assessment can be a valuable tool. But an ongoing challenge for schools is to implement threat assessment in a manner that minimizes unintended negative consequences. [10]

4. Individuals who commit a school shooting are most likely to obtain a weapon by theft from a family member, indicating a need for more secure firearm storage practices.

In an open-source database study, 80% of individuals who carried out a K-12 mass shooting stole the firearm used in the shooting from a family member. [11] In contrast, those who committed mass shootings outside of schools often purchased guns lawfully (77%).

K-12 mass shootings were more likely to involve the use of a semi-automatic assault weapon than mass shootings in other settings, but handguns were still the most common weapon used in K-12 mass shootings.

Explore more information about the backgrounds, guns, and motivations of individuals who commit mass shootings using The Violence Project interactive database. [12]

5. The overwhelming majority of individuals who commit K-12 mass shootings struggle with various aspects of mental well-being.

Nearly all individuals who carried out a K-12 mass shooting (92%-100%) were found to be suicidal before or during the shooting. [13] Most experienced significant childhood hardship or trauma. Those who commit K-12 mass shootings commonly have histories of antisocial behavior and, in a minority of cases, various forms of psychoses.

Despite the prevalence of mental well-being struggles in these individuals’ life histories, studies suggest that profiling based on mental health does not aid prevention. [14] However, research on common psychological factors associated with K-12 mass shootings, along with other factors that precipitate school violence, can help inform targeted intervention in coordination with crisis intervention, threat assessment, and improved firearm safety practices.

Learn more from these NIJ reports:

• Understanding the Causes of School Violence Using Open Source Data
• A Multi-Level, Multi-Method Investigation of the Psycho-Social Life Histories of Mass Shooters
• The Causes and Consequences of School Violence: A Review
• A Comprehensive School Safety Framework: Report to the Committees on Appropriations

[note 1] National Institute of Justice funding award description, “Student Threat Assessment as a Safe and Supportive Prevention Strategy,” at the Rector & Visitors of the University of Virginia, award number 2014-CK-BX-0004 ; National Institute of Justice funding award description, “Understanding the Causes of School Violence Using Open Source Data,” at the Research Foundation of the City University of New York, award number 2016-CK-BX-0013 ; National Institute of Justice funding award description, “Mass Shooter Database,” at Hamline University, award number 2018-75-CX-0023 , and National Institute of Justice funding award description, “Improving the Understanding of Mass Shooting Plots,” at the RAND Corporation, award number 2019-R2-CX-0003 .

[note 2] Meagan N. Abel, Steven Chermak, and Joshua D. Freilich, “ Pre-Attack Warning Behaviors of 20 Adolescent School Shooters: A Case Study Analysis ,” Crime & Delinquency 68 no. 5 (2022): 786-813.

[note 3] Jillian Peterson et al., “ Communication of Intent To Do Harm Preceding Mass Public Shootings in the United States, 1966 to 2019 ,” JAMA Network Open 4 no. 11 (2021): e2133073.

[note 4] Abel, Chermak, and Freilich, “Pre-Attack Warning Behaviors”; and Jillian Peterson and James Densley, The Violence Project: How To Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic (New York: Abrams Press, 2021).

[note 5] Michael Planty et al., School Safety Tip Line Toolkit , Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI International.

[note 6] RAND Corporation, “ Mass Attacks Defense Toolkit: Preventing Mass Attacks, Saving Lives ."

[note 7] National Police Foundation, Averted School Violence (ASV) Database: 2021 Analysis Update , Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

[note 8] Dewey Cornell and Jennifer Maeng, “ Student Threat Assessment as a Safe and Supportive Prevention Strategy, Final Technical Report ,” Final report to the National Institute of Justice, award number 2014-CK-BX-0004, August 2020, NCJ 255102.

[note 9] Shelby L. Stohlman and Dewey G. Cornell, “ An Online Educational Program To Increase Student Understanding of Threat Assessment ,” Journal of School Heath 89 no. 11 (2019): 899-906.

[note 10] Cornell and Maeng, “Student Threat Assessment.”

[note 11] Jillian Peterson, “ A Multi-Level, Multi-Method Investigation of the Psycho-Social Life Histories of Mass Shooters ,” Final report to the National Institute of Justice, award number 2018-75-CX-0023, September 2021, NCJ 302101.

[note 12] The Violence Project, “ Mass Shooter Database .”

[note 13] Peterson, “A Multi-Level, Multi-Method Investigation.” 14Dewey G. Cornell, “ Threat Assessment as a School Violence Prevention Strategy ,” Criminology & Public Policy 19 no. 1 (2020): 235-252.

[note 14] Dewey G. Cornell, “Threat Assessment as a School Violence Prevention Strategy,” Criminology & Public Policy 19 no. 1 (2020): 235-252, https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12471.

Cite this Article

Read more about:, nij's "five things" series.

Find more titles in NIJ's "Five Things" series . 

• Ethics & Leadership
• Fact-Checking
• Media Literacy
• The Craig Newmark Center
• Reporting & Editing
• Ethics & Trust
• Tech & Tools
• Business & Work
• Educators & Students
• Training Catalog
• Custom Teaching
• For ACES Members
• All Categories
• Broadcast & Visual Journalism
• Fact-Checking & Media Literacy
• In-newsroom
• Memphis, Tenn.
• Minneapolis, Minn.
• St. Petersburg, Fla.
• Washington, D.C.
• Poynter ACES Introductory Certificate in Editing
• Poynter ACES Intermediate Certificate in Editing
• Ethics & Trust Articles
• Get Ethics Advice
• Fact-Checking Articles
• International Fact-Checking Day
• Teen Fact-Checking Network
• International
• Media Literacy Training
• MediaWise Resources
• Ambassadors
• MediaWise in the News

Support responsible news and fact-based information today!

Armed campus police do not prevent school shootings, research shows

Multiple studies have found no association between the presence of armed officers in schools and the deterrence of violence..

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has  blamed   others  for  politicizing  the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, to advance discussions about gun access.

To Cruz, the answer is simpler.

“We know from past experiences that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus,” Cruz  said in Washington on May 24 , just hours after the shooting, before many details were known.

Ted Cruz proposes armed cops in elementary schools to deter school shootings pic.twitter.com/sJ8B6cf9Xd — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 25, 2022

“Inevitably when there’s a murder of this kind, you see politicians try to politicize it, you see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. That doesn’t work. It’s not effective. It doesn’t prevent crime.”

Is it true that we know from “past experiences that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus”?

Whether it’s anecdotal evidence or broad-based research, there is little to support Cruz’s claim. Let’s start with what happened in Uvalde, Texas.

Uvalde shooting details

Officials have offered various and conflicting reports at what happened at Robb Elementary School. On May 25, Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety Steven McCraw said that before 18-year-old Salvador Ramos entered the school and shot and killed at least 19 children and two teachers, he was confronted by a district school resource officer, a common title for armed police officers who work on school grounds.

“There was a brave consolidated independent school district resource officer that approached (Ramos), engaged him and, at that time, gunfire was not exchanged,” McCraw  said . “The subject was able to make it into the school.”

Other media accounts offer some different details about the number of officers and the level of confrontation.

And then on May 26, Texas law enforcement officials said Ramos was able to enter the school unobstructed and that a school resource officer was not on scene.

“He walked in unobstructed initially,”  said Victor Escalon , regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Law enforcement officers ultimately shot and killed Ramos, McCraw said, but not before at least  21 people were killed  and 17 additional people were  injured .

The Sante Fe, Texas, shooting

In 2018, in Texas, Cruz responded to another school shooting, this one at Santa Fe High School, in Santa Fe, Texas.

In that case, the shooter was confronted by two police officers who were stationed at the school, according to a  local sheriff . The officers, one of whom was  shot  during the attack, “hemmed the gunman into one classroom and saved lives by drawing his attention and fire,” the sheriff said.

About 30 minutes after the shooting started, the 17-year-old suspect  surrendered  to law enforcement. A  total  of 10 people were killed and 13 were wounded. Multiple explosive devices were also found at or near the school, officials said.

The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on gun issues,  found that  in Santa Fe and in three other prominent shootings in 2018 — Kentucky’s Marshall County High School in January; Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February; Maryland’s Great Mills High School in March — “attackers stormed campuses despite the presence of armed guards.” In each case, guards failed to stop the shooter from killing.

What research says about armed law enforcement in schools

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, attends a prayer vigil in Uvalde, Texas, Wednesday, May 25, 2022. The vigil was held to honor the victims killed in Tuesday’s shooting at Robb Elementary School. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Broader research provides not much support for Cruz’s claim that armed law enforcement officers on school grounds are the “most effective tool” for keeping kids safe from mass shootings.

A  2021 study  conducted by researchers from University at Albany and RAND examined data from U.S. schools between 2014 to 2018 to evaluate the impact of school resource officers. It found that school resource officers “do effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools, but do not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents.”

In addition, that study found that school resource officers appear to protect students from “a non-trivial number of physical attacks and fights within schools,” which could have long-term academic and psychological benefits for students. But schools with resource officers also report more suspensions, expulsions, police referrals and student arrests — and those harsher disciplinary punishments disproportionately fall on Black students, male students and students with disabilities.

Another  2021 JAMA Network study  conducted by researchers at Hamline University and Metropolitan State University in Minnesota examined a total of 133 school shootings and attempted school shootings from 1980 to 2019.

It was limited by the availability of public data and the inability to measure deterred shootings, among other factors, but researchers found that, controlling for other factors such as location, school type and region, the data showed “armed guards were not associated with significant reduction in rates of injuries” during school mass shootings.

Further, when researchers controlled for location and school characteristic factors, “the rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater (emphasis added) in schools with an armed guard present.”

Pete Blair, the executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training  Center  at Texas State University, said armed individuals can play a role in stopping school shootings in progress but cautioned against any claim that it’s “the most effective tool” or that it prevents school shootings.

In Illinois in 2018, for instance, officials credited an officer with avoiding a potential school shooting  involving a student at the school . The shooter’s mother said she thought her son was trying to get the police to kill him. Only the shooter was injured.

Blair said the ALERRT Center is part of a group that works with the FBI to release annual active shooter data. The FBI defines an active shooter as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.”

That data shows that from  2000  until  2021 , there have been 434 active shooter incidents, Blair said. This includes shooter incidents in schools and elsewhere.

“The most common resolution is for the attacker to flee,” Blair said, which happened in about 25% of all cases.

In about the same number of cases, the shooting stopped when a responding on-duty police officer, armed security or off-duty officer shot the attacker, he said.

Blair said the data isn’t specific enough to break down whether police officers who used force to stop an attack were already stationed there at the time — as a school resource officer likely would be — or were called in specifically to respond to the incident.

Dewey Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia who studies school safety, bullying and student threat assessment, said he has seen research that suggests school resource officers “can be valuable in building relationships with students and working with threat assessment teams, but not as armed guards protecting the campus from a shooter.”

“I know of no scientific evidence that having armed law enforcement on campus by itself keeps kids safe at school,” he said. “We have prevented school shootings by identifying threats and working with troubled students before they make an attack.”

Are armed officers a deterrent?

PolitiFact found no studies or research that conclusively showed that the presence of armed officers deterred people from targeting schools.

“From a theoretical point of view, it makes sense. Trying to prove it empirically can be difficult,” Blair said. “I can’t point to any specific cases and say, here’s this specific case where this person said, they looking at this and they chose not to because there was an armed security guard there.’”

The  2021 JAMA Network study  said data suggested “no association between having an armed officer and deterrence of violence” in mass shootings from 1980 to 2019.

“Prior research suggests that many school shooters are actively suicidal, intending to die in the act, so an armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent,” the study said.

Steve Guest, a spokesperson for Cruz, pointed to a 2019  Vox article  that referenced 2005 research that suggested increased police presence leads to fewer people committing crimes. The article and research wasn’t looking at school shootings specifically.

The spokesperson also referenced a  2018 report  that found for 238 middle and high schools in West Virginia, the presence of resource officers “increases the number of reported incidents related to drug crime as well as the number of out-of-school suspensions for drug crime, but decreases violent crime and disorder when multiple years are considered.” Again, the report wasn’t looking at school shootings specifically. It did say that school resource officers are more likely to work with law enforcement to create a written plan for “how to deal with shootings.”

Cruz said, “We know from past experiences that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus.”

A  2021 JAMA Network study  said data found “no association between having an armed officer and deterrence of violence” in mass shootings from 1980 to 2019. A 2021 study by the University at Albany and RAND said school resource officers “do not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents.”

We rate this claim False.

This article was originally  published by PolitiFact , which is part of the Poynter Institute. It is republished here with permission. See the sources for these fact checks  here  and more of their fact checks  here .

Opinion | O.J. Simpson, whose murder trial reshaped the media, dies at 76

Simpson’s trial lured a nation to its TVs, launched a network, created enduring ethics case studies and led to numerous career breakouts.

A fact-checker’s guide to Trump’s first criminal trial: business records, hush money and a gag order

Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.

Grant applications now open to support reporting on transgender issues

The Gill Foundation has partnered with Poynter’s Beat Academy to train local journalists to serve as accurate, authoritative voices 

Opinion | Republican lawmaker crushes Tucker Carlson with surprisingly legitimate commentary

Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw blasted the former Fox News host for being a ‘click-chaser’ in a capable rant on X.

Donald Trump said all legal scholars, ‘on both sides,’ wanted federal abortion law overturned. That’s wrong.

Roe v. Wade inspired legions of supporters and opponents. Before the 2022 ruling, numerous legal scholars urged the Supreme Court to uphold it.

Start your day informed and inspired.

Get the Poynter newsletter that's right for you.

Most US teachers worry about school shootings, survey finds

(Reuters) - A solid majority of U.S. teachers go to work each day anxious that a shooting will unfold at their school, a trend that has paralleled the rising number of such incidents across the U.S., a report released on Friday showed.

A Pew Research Center survey of about 2,500 teachers showed that more than half of them were at least somewhat concerned and another 18% were extremely or very worried about the possibility of a shooting at their school.

Gun control and school safety have become major political and social issues in the U.S. where the number of school shootings has jumped in recent years.

There were 912 school shootings between 2021 and 2023, more than three times as many as any other three year-period in four decades of data collection, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database website.

The survey, conducted from Oct. 17 to Nov. 14, 2023, indicated that 31% of teachers in urban schools had a gun-related lockdown during the 2022-23 school year, 10 percentage points higher than teachers in both suburban and rural schools.

Only three out of 10 teachers indicated that their school had done an excellent or very good job preparing them for an active shooter, the survey showed.

More than three-fifths of teachers surveyed said improved mental health screening and treatment for children and adults would be extremely or very effective at preventing shootings. Half said police officers or armed security in schools would be highly effective.

More than a quarter of teachers who lean Republican and only 3% of who lean Democrat thought allowing teachers and school staff to carry weapons would be highly effective in stopping school shootings.

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Chicago; Editing by David Gregorio)

Read our research on: Gun Policy | International Conflict | Election 2024

Regions & Countries

About 1 in 4 u.s. teachers say their school went into a gun-related lockdown in the last school year.

Twenty-five years after the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado , a majority of public K-12 teachers (59%) say they are at least somewhat worried about the possibility of a shooting ever happening at their school. This includes 18% who say they’re extremely or very worried, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to better understand public K-12 teachers’ views on school shootings, how prepared they feel for a potential active shooter, and how they feel about policies that could help prevent future shootings.

To do this, we surveyed 2,531 U.S. public K-12 teachers from Oct. 17 to Nov. 14, 2023. The teachers are members of RAND’s American Teacher Panel, a nationally representative panel of public school K-12 teachers recruited through MDR Education. Survey data is weighted to state and national teacher characteristics to account for differences in sampling and response to ensure they are representative of the target population.

We also used data from our 2022 survey of U.S. parents. For that project, we surveyed 3,757 U.S. parents with at least one child younger than 18 from Sept. 20 to Oct. 2, 2022. Find more details about the survey of parents here .

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

Another 31% of teachers say they are not too worried about a shooting occurring at their school. Only 7% of teachers say they are not at all worried.

This survey comes at a time when school shootings are at a record high (82 in 2023) and gun safety continues to be a topic in 2024 election campaigns .

Teachers’ experiences with lockdowns

About a quarter of teachers (23%) say they experienced a lockdown in the 2022-23 school year because of a gun or suspicion of a gun at their school. Some 15% say this happened once during the year, and 8% say this happened more than once.

High school teachers are most likely to report experiencing these lockdowns: 34% say their school went on at least one gun-related lockdown in the last school year. This compares with 22% of middle school teachers and 16% of elementary school teachers.

Teachers in urban schools are also more likely to say that their school had a gun-related lockdown. About a third of these teachers (31%) say this, compared with 19% of teachers in suburban schools and 20% in rural schools.

Do teachers feel their school has prepared them for an active shooter?

About four-in-ten teachers (39%) say their school has done a fair or poor job providing them with the training and resources they need to deal with a potential active shooter.

A smaller share (30%) give their school an excellent or very good rating, and another 30% say their school has done a good job preparing them.

Teachers in urban schools are the least likely to say their school has done an excellent or very good job preparing them for a potential active shooter. About one-in-five (21%) say this, compared with 32% of teachers in suburban schools and 35% in rural schools.

Teachers who have police officers or armed security stationed in their school are more likely than those who don’t to say their school has done an excellent or very good job preparing them for a potential active shooter (36% vs. 22%).

Overall, 56% of teachers say they have police officers or armed security stationed at their school. Majorities in rural schools (64%) and suburban schools (56%) say this, compared with 48% in urban schools.

Only 3% of teachers say teachers and administrators at their school are allowed to carry guns in school. This is slightly more common in school districts where a majority of voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2020 than in school districts where a majority of voters cast ballots for Joe Biden (5% vs. 1%).

What strategies do teachers think could help prevent school shootings?

The survey also asked teachers how effective some measures would be at preventing school shootings.

Most teachers (69%) say improving mental health screening and treatment for children and adults would be extremely or very effective.

About half (49%) say having police officers or armed security in schools would be highly effective, while 33% say the same about metal detectors in schools.

Just 13% say allowing teachers and school administrators to carry guns in schools would be extremely or very effective at preventing school shootings. Seven-in-ten teachers say this would be not too or not at all effective.

How teachers’ views differ by party

Republican and Republican-leaning teachers are more likely than Democratic and Democratic-leaning teachers to say each of the following would be highly effective:

• Having police officers or armed security in schools (69% vs. 37%)
• Having metal detectors in schools (43% vs. 27%)
• Allowing teachers and school administrators to carry guns in schools (28% vs. 3%)

And while majorities in both parties say improving mental health screening and treatment would be highly effective at preventing school shootings, Democratic teachers are more likely than Republican teachers to say this (73% vs. 66%).

Parents’ views on school shootings and prevention strategies

In fall 2022, we asked parents a similar set of questions about school shootings.

Roughly a third of parents with K-12 students (32%) said they were extremely or very worried about a shooting ever happening at their child’s school. An additional 37% said they were somewhat worried.

As is the case among teachers, improving mental health screening and treatment was the only strategy most parents (63%) said would be extremely or very effective at preventing school shootings. And allowing teachers and school administrators to carry guns in schools was seen as the least effective – in fact, half of parents said this would be not too or not at all effective. This question was asked of all parents with a child younger than 18, regardless of whether they have a child in K-12 schools.

Like teachers, parents’ views on strategies for preventing school shootings differed by party. 

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

Sign up for our weekly newsletter

Fresh data delivered Saturday mornings

‘Back to school’ means anytime from late July to after Labor Day, depending on where in the U.S. you live

Among many u.s. children, reading for fun has become less common, federal data shows, most european students learn english in school, for u.s. teens today, summer means more schooling and less leisure time than in the past, about one-in-six u.s. teachers work second jobs – and not just in the summer, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

What Teachers Think Might Prevent School Shootings

N ext month marks the two-year anniversary of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas , during which 19 elementary-school students and two teachers lost their lives, and 17 other people were shot. So far this year, there have been at least 50 shootings on school grounds, causing 16 deaths . So it's probably not surprising that more than half of public-school K-12 teachers in the U.S. are at least somewhat worried about a shooting in their place of work.

In a new survey by Pew Research Center , about a quarter of teachers report that their school had at least one gun-related lockdown in the last year, and 15% had more than one. Most of the teachers whose school had such a lockdown taught at high school level and in urban areas. Teachers in urban schools were also the most likely to say they felt their school had ill-prepared them for a shooting, and the least likely to say the school had an armed guard. Overall, about 60% of teachers are worried about a shooting at their own school and 7% are extremely worried.

Read More: It's Even Bleaker for Teachers Than You Thought

To some extent, teachers agree about what should be done to address the issue. On April 10, lawmakers in Tennessee, which lost three 9-year-olds to a school shooting in Nashville just over a year ago, passed a bill that allowed some staff to carry concealed weapons on school grounds. According to Pew, the overwhelming majority of teachers (70%) do not think that is the answer. (A RAND study taken last year found that more than half of teachers believed that carrying guns would actually make schools less safe.) A large proportion (69%), however, believe that improving mental-health screening and treatment for children and adults would help prevent shootings. About half think police officers or armed security guards would make a difference, and a third endorse metal detectors.

But a closer look at the findings from Pew suggests that teachers are divided along similar lines as the rest of America about how to solve the problem of guns in schools. While relatively few teachers, regardless of politics, believe it would be "extremely or very effective" if teachers and administrators carried guns, those who lean Republican are about nine times more likely than those who lean Democratic (28% to 3%) to think so. Only 37% on the Democrat side think having armed security staff would work well, while 69% on the Republican side do. And while close to half (43%) of GOP-aligned educators endorse metal detectors, only slightly more than a quarter (27%) of Dem respondents do.

These findings among teachers arrive as a subtle but detectable change in public perspective on who is responsible when a student fires a gun at school has begun to emerge. On April 9, it was revealed that a former assistant principal in Virginia, who allegedly did not heed warnings that a 6-year-old boy had brought a gun to school, had been indicted on charges of child abuse and neglect after that boy shot a teacher in 2023. That same day the parents of a school shooter in Michigan were sentenced to at least 10 years of prison time after they were convicted of involuntary manslaughter for failing to prevent their 15-year-old son from killing four of his schoolmates.

Tennessee parents who opposed their state's new legislation, including some of those whose children lived through the shooting in Nashville, expressed dismay at the new legislation. "As mothers of survivors, all we can do is continue to show up and keep sharing our stories and hope that eventually they will listen to them and take our advice," Melissa Alexander told The Tennessean . "We have real experiences in these tragedies. We are the ones who have been there, experienced this and lived through the aftermath of it." Beth Gebhard was even more blunt. "If what had happened on March 27 had gone down the way that it did with a teacher armed with a handgun attempting to put the perpetrator out," she said, "my children would likely be dead."

More Must-Reads From TIME

• Exclusive: Google Workers Revolt Over $1.2 Billion Contract With Israel
• Jane Fonda Champions Climate Action for Every Generation
• Stop Looking for Your Forever Home
• The Sympathizer Counters 50 Years of Hollywood Vietnam War Narratives
• The Bliss of Seeing the Eclipse From Cleveland
• Hormonal Birth Control Doesn’t Deserve Its Bad Reputation
• The Best TV Shows to Watch on Peacock
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

Most Teachers Worry a Shooting Could Happen at Their School

• Share article

After years of efforts by administrators and policymakers to improve school safety, a majority of teachers are at least somewhat concerned about a shooting occurring at their school, and 7 percent say they are “extremely” worried.

That’s according to a Pew Research Center Survey of 2,531 U.S. public K-12 teachers released April 11, in which respondents identified improved mental health screening for children and adults as the top strategy to prevent shootings.

The findings of the nationally representative survey, conducted from Oct. 17 to Nov. 14, 2023, come as the nation approaches the 25-year commemoration of the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.—an event that changed conversations about school safety and helped fuel precautions like routine lockdown drills, which were conducted by 96 percent of public schools in the 2021-22 school year, according to the most recent federal data.

While mass school shootings are statistically rare events, their pace and scale have accelerated since the April 20, 1999 Columbine attack. Teachers’ responses demonstrate how much the fear of the worst-case scenario has shaped their experiences at work.

1. Teachers are concerned about a potential shooting at their school

Asked if they were concerned about a shooting occurring at their school, just 7 percent of respondents said “not at all.”

Educators, policymakers, and the public use varying criteria related to determine what is considered a school shooting; some limit their discussions to mass-casualty events that occur inside school buildings during school hours. But attacks at sporting events, during extracurricular activities, and in school parking lots can also create safety concerns, educators say.

There have been 10 school shootings in 2024 that resulted in injuries or deaths, according to an Education Week analysis. That count includes incidents during school-sponsored events and on school grounds, like a March 2 shooting outside of a high school basketball game in North Kansas City, Mo.

2. Many teachers say their schools could do more to prepare them for an active shooter

While a majority of respondents said their school has done at least a “good” job “providing them with the training and resources they need to deal with a potential active shooter in their school,” 39 percent said their school has done a “fair” or “poor job.”

Rural teachers were most likely to say their school had done an “excellent” or “very good” job preparing them, while teachers in urban schools were the least likely to agree with that statement.

While lawmakers’ calls to “harden schools” with physical security measures like metal detectors and armed school staff often get the most attention following a high-profile shooting, school safety experts have stressed prevention and preparing staff through procedures like basic lockdown drills.

3. Lockdowns disrupt school for students and teachers

While shootings are rare, the potential of a shooting causes regular disruptions for students and educators, who lock down classrooms as a precaution. Suspicious people near a school, reports of guns in classrooms, or threats can all prompt a lockdown.

Twenty-three percent of respondents to the Pew survey said their school went into lockdown at least once in the 2022-23 school year “because of a gun or suspicion of a gun on school property.” And 8 percent of teachers said their school had more than one gun-related lockdown.

Lockdowns were most common in high schools and in urban areas, teachers reported.

4. Teachers favor mental health support as a prevention strategy

Asked about a menu of strategies, respondents were most likely to say that “improving mental health screening and treatment for children and adults” would help prevent school shootings. Sixty-nine percent rated mental health as an “extremely” or “very” effective prevention strategy.

The survey did not specify who would be responsible for improved mental health supports. But many schools have sought to upgrade their counseling supports as they face a student mental health crisis. School-based mental health screenings have faced resistance from parents and policymakers concerned about student privacy, stigmatization, and possible civil rights violations if the results aren’t used properly.

Allowing teachers and administrators to carry guns was the least supported strategy, with just 13 percent of respondents agreeing it would be “extremely” or “very” effective.

Teachers’ support for prevention strategies varied based on political affiliation. The biggest difference based on political affiliation was in support of “having police officers or armed security stationed in schools.” Among respondents who identified as Democrat or “lean Democrat,” 37 percent said the strategy would be “extremely” or “very effective” at preventing school shootings, compared to 69 percent of self-identified Republican or “lean Republican” respondents.

Research suggests that , while school police do mitigate some types of violence in schools, their presence also correlates with increased student suspensions, expulsions, and arrests. There are also limited examples of school resource officers stopping school shootings, though advocates argue they may serve as a deterrent for would-be attackers.

Sign Up for The Savvy Principal

Edweek top school jobs.

Sign Up & Sign In

Most US Teachers Worry About School Shootings, Survey Finds

The flag on Main St flies at half-staff to mark the 10th anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, U.S., December 14, 2022. REUTERS/Michelle McLoughlin

(Reuters) - A solid majority of U.S. teachers go to work each day anxious that a shooting will unfold at their school, a trend that has paralleled the rising number of such incidents across the U.S., a report released on Friday showed.

A Pew Research Center survey of about 2,500 teachers showed that more than half of them were at least somewhat concerned and another 18% were extremely or very worried about the possibility of a shooting at their school.

Gun control and school safety have become major political and social issues in the U.S. where the number of school shootings has jumped in recent years.

There were 912 school shootings between 2021 and 2023, more than three times as many as any other three year-period in four decades of data collection, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database website.

The survey, conducted from Oct. 17 to Nov. 14, 2023, indicated that 31% of teachers in urban schools had a gun-related lockdown during the 2022-23 school year, 10 percentage points higher than teachers in both suburban and rural schools.

Only three out of 10 teachers indicated that their school had done an excellent or very good job preparing them for an active shooter, the survey showed.

More than three-fifths of teachers surveyed said improved mental health screening and treatment for children and adults would be extremely or very effective at preventing shootings. Half said police officers or armed security in schools would be highly effective.

More than a quarter of teachers who lean Republican and only 3% of who lean Democrat thought allowing teachers and school staff to carry weapons would be highly effective in stopping school shootings.

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Chicago; Editing by David Gregorio)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

Join the Conversation

Tags: United States , crime , education

America 2024

Health News Bulletin

Stay informed on the latest news on health and COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report.

Sign in to manage your newsletters »

Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy .

You May Also Like

The 10 worst presidents.

U.S. News Staff Feb. 23, 2024

Cartoons on President Donald Trump

Feb. 1, 2017, at 1:24 p.m.

Photos: Obama Behind the Scenes

April 8, 2022

Photos: Who Supports Joe Biden?

March 11, 2020

Trump Gives Johnson Vote of Confidence

Aneeta Mathur-Ashton April 12, 2024

U.S.: Threat From Iran ‘Very Credible’

Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder April 12, 2024

Inflation Up, Consumer Sentiment Steady

Tim Smart April 12, 2024

House GOP Hands Johnson a Win

A Watershed Moment for America

Lauren Camera April 12, 2024

The Politically Charged Issue of EVs

Amid relentless school shootings, scrutiny extends beyond the shooter

On Tuesday, parents in Michigan were sentenced to prison for what they did — and didn’t do — before their son’s high school rampage. The same day in Virginia, court records showed what are thought to be the first criminal charges against a school leader for missed warnings, in her case before a 6-year-old shot his teacher.

Meanwhile, in Uvalde, Tex., civil suits seeking to hold city officials and others responsible for a 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School continue to make their way through the courts.

In a country where mass killings occur at a relentless pace, it’s not just the shooters who are being held responsible, as the blood and death haunting classrooms and playgrounds alters society’s collective sense of accountability.

Gun manufacturers, gun stores and public officials have all faced civil suits. Parents are being scrutinized over how their children got access to firearms used in school shootings. And experts say the criminal charges against a Virginia school official are particularly striking, and could inspire more prosecutors to look deeply at the conduct of teachers or administrators in the wake of classroom massacres.

Americans are frustrated by the political impasse over proposals to restrict access to guns and are “just exhausted” by the bloodshed, said Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare at UCLA who studies school shootings. At the same time, training and data about school shootings has spread far and wide, and practices for preventing and responding to them are well established.

“Every principal and vice principal should be aware there is a level of culpability right now,” Astor said. “To say, ‘I wasn’t aware, I didn’t see the signs’ is not acceptable for us as a society. It’s not just a small trend. I think we’ve reached a level where we just don’t want to take it anymore.”

In 2023, there were 34 shootings on K-12 campuses during school hours, according to The Washington Post’s database of incidents , a figure that has spiked since the pandemic and ran about 13 per year before 2020. And every few years the country has been shaken by an assault producing massive casualties: 26 gunned down in Newtown, Conn.; 17 killed at a high school in Parkland, Fla.; 21 dead in Uvalde.

Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law, the litigation arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, said these civil suits are aimed at both accountability and deterrence. “It’s really expanding the tools that we have … to advance behavior change and shake up the way that we’ve been approaching gun violence,” he said.

More and more lawsuits

Attempts to hold others accountable for a shooter’s actions are not entirely new. They date back at least to the 1999 Columbine High School shooting , in which two 12th-grade students killed 12 of their classmates, one teacher and themselves.

Those murders spurred a flurry of lawsuits against local officials, including law enforcement. Most were dismissed — although one suit against police was settled for $1.5 million. The families of victims also sued the shooters’ families and two people who allegedly helped the teens get access to guns, settling the case for $2.5 million.

But experts say they are seeing a rise in civil suits and novel criminal prosecutions like the one in Richneck. And a paper published this year in the Yale Journal on Regulation found there is an “increasing willingness of the plaintiffs’ bar to bring claims” against gun manufacturers following a shooting or mass killing event, including those in Newtown and Uvalde. The report noted there have been seven high-profile suits pursued against gun manufacturers in the last three years alone.

Josh Koskoff, a Connecticut attorney who has represented the families of several mass killing victims, cites a rising sense of helplessness combined with frustration over legislative inaction. It’s led families to look for alternate solutions, including lawsuits seeking to hold gun manufacturers and sellers responsible for the deaths their weapons cause.

Koskoff represented the families of nine people killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Newtown, Conn., securing a landmark $73 million settlement with the now-bankrupt Remington Arms, which manufactured the gun the perpetrator used to kill 20 first-graders and six educators. He also represents families in Uvalde, where he said they were “reviewing their legal options.”

“It used to be you might look at a situation and your heart would go out to a family that had lost a child, but you’d think it’s too big a hurdle to hold the gun industry accountable,” he said. “But now, lawyers see the possibilities in bringing cases where they may not have seen them before.”

‘Coming at this from all sides’

It was a 15-year-old high school student who gunned down four of his classmates at Oxford High School in Michigan and wounded seven others. Ethan Crumbley was sentenced to life in prison for his crimes.

But prosecutors almost immediately assigned some of the blame to his parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, who bought their son the weapon while, they said, ignoring his mental health struggles. The day of the shooting, the parents had been summoned to the school to discuss violent images and messages their son scrawled on his homework — including a drawing of a gun and the words “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” The Crumbleys never told school officials he had access to a gun.

In a rarity, they were both charged and convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Oakland County Circuit Judge Cheryl A. Matthews admonished both of them from the bench this week as she sentenced the Crumbleys to 10 to 15 years in prison.

“Mrs. Crumbley, you glorified the use and possession of these weapons,” Matthews said to Jennifer Crumbley, 45. “Your attitude toward your son and his behavior was dispassionate and apathetic.”

In Virginia, prosecutors also looked beyond the actions of a 6-year-old boy who grabbed his mother’s handgun out of her purse, brought it to Richneck Elementary School in his backpack and that afternoon, shot and seriously injured his teacher, Abigail Zwerner.

His mother was convicted in federal and state courts of firearms violations and child neglect for lying on a background check when she purchased the gun used in the shooting and failing to secure it. She is currently serving out her sentences.

And in what is believed to be a first, prosecutors charged Richneck’s former assistant principal, Ebony Parker , with eight counts of child abuse. A special grand jury found she was warned three times on the day of the shooting that the boy had a weapon but failed to do anything.

The case is also being litigated in civil court. Zwerner filed a $40 million lawsuit against the school district and several officials, citing Parker’s role.

Parker’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment, but in a response to the lawsuit denied Zwerner’s claims. Parker resigned from Richneck after the shooting.

Debra Baum, who survived a 2022 Fourth of July mass killing in Highland Park, Ill. , followed the cases in Michigan and Virginia closely. It felt to her like America might be starting to hold people accountable for the shootings that have converted so many schools, dance clubs and grocery stores into sites of tragedy and death. In the Illinois case, the shooter and his father both faced charges in connection with the case.

“I just feel like we’re now coming at this from all sides, and I’m hopeful that the national opinion is changing,” Baum said. “People are paying attention to how scary and dangerous a situation this is.”

Criminal prosecutions also sometimes come up empty.

The lone armed school resource officer assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was charged after he remained outside the school while Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 people in 2018. He was the first law enforcement officer in the country to be charged with allegedly mishandling a school shooting.

Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson was suspended after the shooting and later resigned. His lack of action during a crucial four-minute stretch of the shooting outraged parents and the sheriff, who chastised him publicly for not doing more to save lives.

Peterson was charged with multiple counts of neglect of child, culpable negligence and perjury for allegedly lying about what he did on the day of the shooting. But some legal and police experts questioned whether his actions amounted to criminal wrongdoing and said the legal theory of the case pressed beyond the limit of Florida’s child neglect law, which was designed to protect children from irresponsible caregivers, not police officers.

Peterson was acquitted on all counts at trial. “The prosecutors tried to sacrifice and pursue baseless charges against a man who did everything he could with the limited information he had under the most stressful of circumstances,” Peterson’s attorney said after the verdict.

Still, in January, a Florida judge allowed a civil suit against Peterson by families of the victims to move forward.

Tim Carey, a law and policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said it’s not clear we are seeing a sea change in who is being held responsible for school shootings, but he does think authorities appear increasingly willing to charge parents and officials when glaring failures contribute to such an incident.

“The Crumbley case and the [Richneck] case are both seemingly unique in that there is this very clear line of opportunities for any reasonable person to intervene and prevent a horrific tragedy,” Carey said. “Those opportunities were heard and willfully ignored and that is what I think is most important about these cases. It may not be a paradigm shift for all school shootings, but at least it provides responsibility when there is a clear line drawn.”

Steven Rich contributed to this report.