Differing data on school shooting casualties since 2013, were there 188 or 1,229?
"How do law enforcement agencies count school shootings and mass shootings? It seems many news stories use different numbers..." I get asked that plenty, mostly from people who are frustrated and frightened of the seemingly ever-rising numbers. The worst part is, that these numbers scare away serious conversations as people opine that they can do nothing to impact change.
Understanding the numbers is the first step to ending gun violence. Take a look at two very credible databases that tally those killed and wounded in schools since 2013 to understand how they come to such widely differing numbers of casualties. One database finds a total of 188 casualties. The other tallies a total of 1,229. If that seems a wide divide, consider that around the same time, U.S. News and World Report reported that there were 346 school shootings in 2023 in the U.S. alone.
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In this blog, I will share one news agency you may or may not be following, NBC, and explain how that organization counts casualties and school shootings. It is a trusted news organization and a system of counting worth looking at. But first, here is more on differing data sets.
When I'm asked about mass shootings data, I explain that there is no federal definition for what constitutes a mass shooting, though mass killing is defined by statute as three or more killed. Instead, the numbers you may hear are developed by non-profits, academics, news media organizations, combinations of those two, or random others. The higher mass shooting numbers you see in headlines and hear from news reporters are conflating all types of unrelated shootings together, making many people afraid that a gun-wielding shooter may come into view at any moment. A fear that is simply not true. Understanding the number starts with considering the source to see what they include in their calculation of "mass shootings."
Let me provide a few examples to illustrate. Mother Jones' mass shooting database was established to include incidents where four or more people were killed, but when a federal law defined mass killing six months later, the publication followed suit and changed its database to include three or more killed, not including the shooter.* (*Edited to correct timing of Mother Jones database change) When Everytown for Gun Safety was created after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, it defined mass shooting as any incident where four or more people were killed, excluding the shooter. A decade later, Everytown numbers took a tack, choosing to include in its count any incident where four or more people were shot and wounded OR killed, excluding the shooter. This is a drastic change and instantaneously increased the numbers released to the public. Though this was planned and announced by the organization, I fear the public and the media missed the memo.
Researchers and academics are trying to put meaning to numbers. But it's hard when shorthand news and social media reports allow so many to ignore the details. And, when those trying to help don't pause to match, for example, domestic violence to domestic violence numbers, or school-day violence to school-day violence numbers, we all suffer the confusing consequences.
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Seven years ago, Mark Follman noted in his own publication, Mother Jones: "Even as these mass shootings have grown more frequent and loom large in our consciousness, they are a tiny fraction of America’s gun violence and remain relatively rare. Yet many news outlets keep declaring that there have been upwards of “355 mass shootings this year” or “more than one mass shooting per day.” Many gun control advocates say the same. This wildly inflated statistic isn’t just misleading the public—it’s stirring undue fear and may be encouraging bad policies."
The FBI research that I designed, sought to capture the public mass shootings that make the news and instill fear. These active shooters are shooting where an individual(s) is actively engaged in attempting to kill people in a confined or populated area. These are the seemingly unpredictable shootings that target the innocent. They exclude gang and drug conflicts generally or murder-suicides discovered in a home, for example.
So where do some of the highest numbers come from today? One example can be found when people pull numbers from a general database like the Gun Violence Archives. Its numbers are often used on social media and by the news media. They use open-source information and categorize something as a "mass shooting" if four people are shot or killed at a particular shooting, not including the shooter. Open source means they are relying on publicly available information such as pulling from government websites and new media reports, for the most part. They do not generally have access to police reports.
The Gun Violence Archives is just that, a database. It's up to those pulling the numbers to do a good job of explaining the differences. Consider also how people use another data set, The K-12 School Shooting Database. You might think this informs the risk of shootings while your kids are at school. But a closer look shows that an incident is added to the list "whenever a gun is fired, or brandished, or a bullet hits school property," regardless of the number of victims, time, day, or reason. And its data includes the shooter in the final numbers. That means a new incident can be added when a person parks their car in a school lot at 4 a.m. to commit suicide, when two gangs clash at midnight on a playground, when a school janitor finds an apparent bullet hole in a storage shed at the edge of a football field, and when a resource officer accidentally discharges their weapon on school grounds. It’s most important to understand what the numbers mean.
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Mixed in all this data are the shootings that occurred at Uvalde and Sandy Hook elementary schools, Parkland, Columbine and Santa Fe high schools, and the Covenant School in Nashville.
Now to the school database you might find helpful, are two data sets collected by NBC. NBC News school shooting tracker logs when one or more active shooters enter a school campus during school hours, right before or after school, or during a school-sanctioned or sponsored event. To make it on the main list, there must be an intent to harm students or faculty with a gun, and at least one person other than the shooter must be wounded or die. Those disparate casualty numbers I mentioned above, The NBC tracker identified 62 school shootings in the past 11 years, killing 116 and injuring 172. Everytown identified 1,168 school shootings in the past 11 years, killing 391 and injuring 838.
Seeking to provide context to all the numbers they use, NBC also has a subset of additional incidents that tally accidental discharges and suicides by firearms at a school, as well as isolated fights, altercations, or domestic disputes, including gang violence. They explain that they created this subset because the Department of Justice's Safe Schools Initiative report, released in 2002, viewed these incidents differently, but still important.
NBC explained why they believed it was important to tally numbers accurately for its news consumers.
"The differing totals can lead to confusion about the number of school shootings," they wrote. "In the hours after the mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Feb. 14, 2018, Everytown for Gun Safety, which tracks every instance of gunfire on school grounds, tweeted that it was the 18th such event in 2018. The tweet was retweeted more than 800 times, prompting the Washington Post to note that only five of the 18 instances occurred during school hours and resulted in injury. "
How can you help? When the next school shooting occurs, don't just re-post a glaring headline that conflates numbers without explanation. We can all work to share meaningful data that can help to inform our decisions about how to keep our schools, businesses, and neighborhoods safer.
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