A six-year-old girl lost one of her white Adidas lace-up sneakers as she and her 21 classmates practiced fleeing for their lives after an imaginary intruder entered their school.
The girl’s teacher asked her to continue walking without a shoe, then grabbed it herself and gave it back to the girl once the class had settled into their designated safe place.
The girl recently recounted losing her shoe on her morning car ride to school. This was just one of several examples in which the girl or her siblings described what they should do—run “to that fence,” “across that field,” or “into that woods”—if an intruder entered their school building.
I know this story because the girl is my daughter.
In the quarter century since the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, an entire generation of children, including my own, have lived under the threat of school-related gun violence. More recent tragedies, such as those at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012 and Robb Elementary School in Texas in May 2022, demonstrate how persistent this threat is.
Unfortunately, gun violence is a central part of the entire modern American educational system, so school shooting and burglary drills have become standard fare not just for my children, but for nearly all American schoolchildren.
I am concerned that during pre-invasion drills – like the one in which my daughter temporarily lost her shoe – students are sometimes harmed. For example, a recent study showed that active intruder drills can cause stress and anxiety in students. In another case, one of these drills led to hysteria and a stampede at a Florida school as students tried to flee from their perceived intruder. Students and teachers alike were horrified when they were told of a real threat and told it was “not a drill.”
As a researcher in developmental and educational psychology—and as an educator who trains future teachers—I understand that schools must ensure the safety of the nation’s 55 million school-age youth. But in the post-Columbine era, is there perhaps a better way to protect children?
I’m not the only one asking this question. The National Academies have launched a new initiative to study the impact of school shootings on student health and well-being and to identify best practices for preparing schools for threats of violence.
A look at the trends
To gain insight into the frequency of gun violence in schools, my colleagues and I conducted a study of school shootings and mass shootings that occurred in American K-12 schools from 1997 to 2022. We used two public databases to count the school shootings and mass shootings that occurred each school year.
School shootings were defined in our study as “any single incident in which a weapon is drawn or fired for any reason, or a bullet strikes school property, regardless of the number of victims, the time of day, or the day of the week.” Mass school shootings were defined as those that occurred at an elementary or high school and met the federal definition of a mass shooting in effect at the time of the shooting: four or more victims killed through December 2012, or three or more victims killed starting in January 2013.
In the 25 school years we studied from 1997 to 2022, there were 1,453 school shootings. More than half of those, 794, occurred in the last five years from 2017 to 2022. Our analysis found a sharp increase in school shootings after 2017. The number of shootings rose from a then-record high of 89 in the 2017-2018 school year to 328 in the 2021-2022 school year.
While the number of school shootings has increased dramatically in recent years, the number of school mass shootings has not increased at the same rate—although they have become deadlier. In total, 11 mass school shootings occurred between the 1997-1998 and 2021-2022 school years, resulting in a total of 126 deaths and 122 injuries. Five of these mass school shootings occurred during the 1997-2012 school years, while six occurred during the 2012-2022 school years. Yet the fatality rate has nearly doubled over the past decade, rising from 7.6 deaths per mass shooting during the 1997-2012 school years to 14 deaths per mass shooting during the 2012-2022 school years.
Efforts to maximize student safety are a top priority. Of course, I want my children’s schools to do everything they can to protect their students. However, many of the current student safety measures – such as appointing school security officers – have not been proven to prevent school shootings or reduce the severity of school shootings in terms of injuries or deaths when they do occur.
Gunshot wounds are now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States. Although school shootings and mass shootings account for only a portion of the gunshot wounds suffered by school-age youth, gun violence—including school-related gun violence—is a public health crisis. Therefore, a public health approach is appropriate.
Building on research
I see at least three ways schools and communities can help reduce gun violence in and around schools:
1: Educate parents and families about safe gun storage.
Educators and community health care providers – including pediatricians, primary care physicians and psychologists – can counsel families on how to safely store firearms. Health care providers can also familiarize themselves with extreme risk protection laws in their states. These laws allow them to work with law enforcement to remove firearms from the home environment when a person is identified who may be at risk of harming themselves or others.
2: Use evidence-based, school-wide approaches to promote school safety.
School safety can be supported through evidence-based approaches such as positive behavioral interventions and supports that aim to improve school practices that impact student achievement. This positive approach can be used to proactively address students’ social, emotional, and behavioral needs and promote school safety. This approach also allows school personnel to monitor and manage student mental health needs, address school-wide behavior and discipline issues, and promote a safe school climate. Accordingly, it can help reduce potential threats of student gun violence.
3: Support laws and regulations on gun safety and violence prevention.
Community members, including parents and teachers, and policymakers can support gun safety laws and evidence-based violence prevention practices and regulations. For example, child protection laws—laws that penalize gun owners when children have access to firearms—reduce gun injuries and gun ownership, helping to keep schools and neighborhoods safer.
Hope for the future
The National Institute for Justice is committed to supporting new research examining gun violence and mass shootings, including research into the effectiveness of school campaigns to educate families about safe gun storage.
These efforts will provide important new insights into how to prevent gun violence in schools.
While my own children and millions of other children attending school in the United States today continue to face the threat of gun violence in schools, I hope that future generations will experience school without fear of someone showing up at their school with a gun.