School Shootings Since 1999 Columbine

Have you ever wondered why anti-gun groups can make the claim that there have been many hundreds of school shootings, but you don’t remember them being in the news? The reason boils down to definitions. When asked to describe a school shooting, most people would describe the same thing: a disgruntled person obtains a gun and targets a school to cause maximum damage and/or the criminal had a connection with that school.

Anti-gun groups want to maximize the numbers to provoke a feeling in voters and advance their anti-gun political agenda. Their goal is to widely ban guns, and they are using school shootings to get to that goal. Pro Second Amendment groups want to protect children.

All sides agree on how horrific and emotionally charged the issue is, but to solve a problem, we first must accurately describe it. Anti-gun groups throw everything they can into the category of “school shooting” because they want to tie their issue to the emotions voters feel when they see a report about children being harmed. They pad their numbers by including crime that happens near schools and crime that happens when schools aren’t even in session.

For example, a drug deal gone wrong across the street from a school, at midnight, during summer recess, on a weekend would be counted by anti-gun groups as a school shooting.

When we compiled a list of school shootings, we didn’t find hundreds. We found that since 1999, there have been 126 total since the 1999 Columbine school shooting. This is significantly smaller than anti-gun groups will have you believe.

We challenge anyone to show me the incidents we are missing, but not by simply sending statistics. What specific incidents did we not include and was that incident something the general public thinks of when they hear the term “school shooting?”

Criteria used

We counted intentional firearm discharges directed at U.S. K-12 schools or at students, employees, security officers, or others in a school-related role. Eligible settings generally included school buildings, grounds, parking lots, and school activities during the school day, arrival, dismissal, or supervised activities. A victim did not have to be injured. We ordinarily excluded accidents, stray fire, unrelated crimes, gang violence, spontaneous personal disputes, and off-campus incidents without compelling evidence of school-related targeting. We allowed documented, explicitly approved exceptions, including certain school-bus incidents, attacks fired from off campus toward schools, and selected borderline cases.

CONFIRMED (C) indicates sufficient evidence of a deliberate school-related attack; PROBABLE (P) indicates material uncertainty or an approved exception. Both are counted. Unknown underlying motive alone did not require exclusion. This is a provisional working list reflecting case-by-case decisions, not a fully source-verified or nationally standardized count.

Chronological incident list