K-12 School Shooting Database 3.0
Four years after launching the K-12 School Shooting Database in September 2018, the project has a new independent public website that is not affiliated with any government agency or institution. The new website includes the addition of several new datapoints and an improved user interface allows for more in-depth analysis of school gun violence incidents. The K-12 SSDB uses open-source information to document every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week. 2,150 school shooting incidents from 1970 to present are currently included.
The K-12 School Shooting Database founder, David Riedman, regularly contributes to the public discussion and with Dr. Jill Peterson and Dr. James Densley from The Violence Project, David co-published six op-eds on school shootings in The Washington Post, LA Times, Star Tribune, Education Week, Sun Sentinel, and The Tennessean (USA Today).
The K-12 SSDB has been used as a primary data source in 60 peer-reviewed articles and reports, and cited by 400 media outlets including The New York Times, USA Today, The Guardian, Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal, Denver Post, New York Post, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Forbes. The database’s original website has been visited by more than 1,00,000 users.
All shootings at schools includes when a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time, or day of the week.
Unlike other data sources, this information includes gang shootings, domestic violence, shootings at sports games and afterhours school events, suicides, fights that escalate into shootings, and accidents.
This information is recorded to document the full scope of gun violence on school campuses.
Incidents are labeled as an “active shooter” when the shooter killed and/or wounded victims, either targeted or random, within the school campus during a continuous episode of violence. The use of this definition/criteria for an “active shooter” blends the FBI’s definition with the homicide literature’s differentiation between a rampage killing versus a traditional homicide. It is important to note that there are widely differing definitions for mass killer, serial killer, rampage killer, active shooter, and school shooter (Madfis, 2020; Newman, 2004; Duwe, 2007; Fox, 2018; FBI; USSS; DOJ).
There is no legal definition, or specific criminal charges, for an “active shooter”.
Knowing exactly where shootings have taken place on school property is critical information to consider when designing security systems and planning emergency procedures. Specific locations where a shooting took place (e.g., hallway, playground, beside building, cafeteria, parking lot, bathroom, classroom, gym, office) are listed for each incident. For example, incidents can be sorted by both time and specific location to determine where the most shootings have occurred during different periods of the school day.
Across the country, school systems are evaluating the effectiveness of school resource officers (SRO) and making difficult decisions on how to allocate reduced budgets. To provide a clearer picture of how shootings conclude, each incident is coded for if the shooter surrendered, fled/escaped, fled/apprehended away from the school, was apprehended/killed by law enforcement, apprehended/killed by school resource officer, apprehended/killed by other, subdued by students/staff/other, commit suicide, or attempted suicide. These details show the situations and locations where police officers and SROs were able to intervene, and alternately when shooters were able to escape.
The original release of the database provided only the total number of people killed and number of people wounded. The updated data contains a separate entry for each victim with their age, gender, affiliation (e.g., student, teacher, staff, parent), and if they were killed, wounded, or had a minor injury (e.g., grazed, cut by shattered glass). There is also a separate entry for each shooter with their age, gender, affiliation, and if they were killed, wounded, commit suicide, or not injured. These new datapoints allow a new and unique level of detail for analysis that was not possible before this update.
This switch to an independent project with new data elements are part of a continued effort to provide the most comprehensive source of publicly available data on school shootings in the United States. The updated research methods page provides a more detailed explanation of the entire information collection and data coding process. If you have any questions about the website redesign and this new data, please email your questions to k12ssdb@gmail.com.
David Riedman is a criminal justice Ph.D. student at the University of Central Florida and founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Follow us on twitter @k12ssdb.
