The goal of this tracker is to continuously identify and contextualize shootings in all kinds of schools across the United States, from kindergarten to college.
The part of planned school shootings where an active shooter intentionally kills, maims, or injures at least one student or faculty member during class or at a school function is the focus of the tracker.See below for the FBI’s definition of an active shooter as well as the complete NBC News criteria for school shootings.
Why we are doing this
In the immediate aftermath of any significant school shooting in the United States, the national discourse recounts the number of similar instances that had occurred in the same year. Depending on the news outlet and how it defines a school shooting, the terrifying figures that are disseminated online, broadcast on television, and printed in newspapers differ.
The Washington Post school shooting database, Everytown for Gun Safety, and the U.S. Department of Education are just a few of the groups and databases that monitor gun violence in schools. Even though each publisher may present a different number of school shootings that have taken place during a certain time period, they all help the public realize the impact of gun violence.
Determining what constitutes a school shooting is one of the challenges in researching gun violence, according to Dr. Daniel Webster, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.
Suppose, Webster suggested, if someone is shot on school property in the evening. Since the location is a school, you may recognize that in a database even though it has nothing to do with the school day and doesn’t include a kid. That adds ambiguity.
Confusion on the number of school shootings may result from the disparate totals. Everytown for Gun Safety, which keeps track of all gunfire on school property, tweeted in the hours following the February 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that it was the 18th such incident of the year. After the tweet was retweeted over 800 times, the Washington Post reported that just five of the 18 incidents that resulted in injuries happened during school hours.
“Broad definitions lead to inflated shooting totals, and inflated totals lead to public fear,” Dr. Lacey Wallace, assistant professor of criminal justice at Penn State University, told NBC News.
According to Wallace, the greater that figure, the more parents are hesitant to send their children to school.
“Our schools are actually pretty safe, and in a lot of cases they’re safer than the surrounding communities,” Wallace stated.
Teams at NBC News worked together, examined pre-existing school shooting databases and sources, and developed a set of standards for planned school shooting counts that could be applied throughout the organization’s newsrooms in an attempt to be more uniform and better match our numbers with our reporting.
How NBC News counts a school shooting
Following the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, the federal Safe School Initiative was established to help identify ways to stop similar incidents in the future. Its paper examines instances of targeted violence in schools where the school was specifically chosen.
In an effort to capture the terror of an active shooter entering a school, the NBC News shooting tracker criteria focuses on the type of incidents described inthe Safe School Initiative report.
Shootings that fit these criteria are included in the NBC News school shooting tracker:
One or more active shooters.The FBI defines an active shooteras an individual engaged in attempting to kill people in a confined space or populated area.
On school property during school hours and as students are arriving or leaving, or at school-sanctioned or school-sponsored events. Schools are defined as ranging from nursery schools to colleges, universities, and technical schools.
There is intent to harm students or faculty with a gun.
At least one person, other than the shooter, is injured or dies.
And while every case of school gun violence is serious and can cause trauma and suffering for the children and adults who experience it, in order to capture the subset of gun violence described in the Safe School Initiative report our count excludes the following cases:
Accidental discharge of a weapon at school
Suicide by firearm at school
Isolated fights, altercations, or domestic disputes*, including gang violence
* There may be exceptions in which a domestic dispute crosses over into the realm of a planned school shooting attack.
Methodology
Our data is derived from an analysis of information from news reports, social media monitoring, theK-12 School Shooting Database,Everytown for Gun Safety, law enforcement and government reports and press conferences, court records, our own reporting, and other publicly available information. Shooting events are recorded and evaluated as new information becomes available and are added to our published dataset when it s determined an incident meets the NBC News standard for planned school shootings carried out by an active shooter.
Note: Every piece of content is rigorously reviewed by our team of experienced writers and editors to ensure its accuracy. Our writers use credible sources and adhere to strict fact-checking protocols to verify all claims and data before publication. If an error is identified, we promptly correct it and strive for transparency in all updates, feel free to reach out to us via email. We appreciate your trust and support!