K-12 School Shooting Database

08/28/2025

Back to School Shootings Podcast Ep 55. Study of 30 rampage school shootings

Three professors explain their paper 'The New Social Roots of School Shootings: A Refined Constellation Theory of Rampage Attacks'.

This was recorded two weeks before the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis and the findings from this peer-reviewed research paper could not be more relevant.

07/25/2025

Question: What's the most important item to treat a gunshot wound at a school?

Trauma surgeon: Cellphone so that you can call 911 and get the child to a hospital as quickly as possible.

Back to School Shootings Ep 50. Trauma surgeon's priority treating gunshot wounds

Guest: Sarabeth Spitzer, MD, MPH, SAFE Co-Founder, General Surgery Resident, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA.

When a child is shot, the top priority is getting the kid to a hospital--ideally in the first 10 minutes--even if the school is on lockdown.

https://k12ssdb.substack.com/p/ep-50-trauma-surgeons-priority-treating

07/21/2025

Why are the Uvalde Families Are Suing Call of Duty and Instagram?

Did you know your character can be a mass shooter in COD Modern Warfare 2 and you can shoot civilians in an airport as they scream and try to crawl away?

The lawsuit’s core argument is that these corporations blurred the lines between virtual worlds and reality which actively contributed to the shooter’s decision to carry out mass violence. These companies embedded advertisements for real guns into the gameplay and allowed kids under 18-years-old use them to practice slaughtering civilians for training.

At first glance, this lawsuit might seem shaky at best by blaming a video game and a social media platform for real-world violence. But the Uvalde families argue this isn't merely about violent content influencing behavior. Instead, they contend it's about deliberate commercial practices including intentional product placement of Daniel Defense rifles and targeted advertising to minors resulting in a reckless disregard for the real-world consequences.

But with every lawsuit, the devil is in the details. Was this protected artistic expression, or was it calculated marketing strategies aimed at underage kids?

https://k12ssdb.substack.com/p/why-uvalde-families-are-suing-call

07/14/2025

I wrote this in February and after the Supreme Court ruling this afternoon, it’s sadly coming true.

Danger of dismantling public education

Schools—and school shootings—sit at the center of a complex web of interconnected social and political issues. Federal policy decisions impact every part of a student’s day from a free breakfast in the morning to paying the salary of a school police officer who might (or might not) arrest them for misbehavior depending on the policies decided by elected officials.

This means that every discussion of student safety, school security, and education is inherently political because schools are public institutions governed by elected politicians at the local, state, and federal level.

The Department of Education has very little power to control curriculums or what teachers do in their individual classrooms. Most federal dollars fund school police officers, support students with disabilities (e.g., care aid for a paralyzed kid in a wheelchair), give free/reduced lunches for low-income kids, and grants to cover operating costs at the poorest (mostly rural) school districts.

Aside from the disabled kids who won’t be able to eat, drink, or use the bathroom all day without the federal funding for the staffer who cares for them at school, dismantling the Department of Education is part of a more dangerous pattern. Over the last century, authoritarian rulers changed the foundational structure of public education as they took control of countries across the world.

Federal dollars go to school police and security, assisting disabled students, free lunches for low-income kids, and keeping the lights on in the poorest, rural school districts.

07/13/2025

Back in the 2010s, early AI systems relied heavily on human-labeled training data. If you wanted an early AI model to identify cats in photos, you had to manually label 25k of images as "cat" to train the model. To classify multiple types of animals, datasets ballooned to 14 million human-labeled images. More labeled data improved accuracy but labeling is slow and expensive, making it impossible to build a perfectly accurate system at scale.

A brute-force workaround was the "human-in-the-loop" model, where people manually reviewed and corrected errors. For example, if a system is 95% accurate and processes 100,000 images an hour, a human reviewer must correct about 83 mistakes per minute. Just like labeled training data, human review becomes an unstainable, exponential labor problem.

In contrast to the old standalone classifier models, today’s sixth-generation general-purpose AI models (like ChatGPT-4o and GROK 4) are trained on trillions of data points using self-supervised learning and can handle a broad range of tasks with far greater adaptability and accuracy than a special purpose model.

Before signing a security tech contract, school leaders should ask a basic question: Are we buying cutting-edge AI or a fossil from Chapter 1 of the machine learning history book?

https://how2ai.substack.com/p/what-generation-of-ai-are-you-selling

07/08/2025

'Love Island' can help prevent school shootings

This viral reality TV show is a case study in social exclusion, in-group/out-group conflicts, emotional regulation, and the power of personal narratives.

Underneath the glittery drama is a case study of human behavior. The show is essentially a social experiment that’s packed with lessons about belonging, emotional regulation, peer intervention, and the desire to be seen. Surprisingly, these themes echo many of the same factors that can either contribute to the crisis of a teen spiraling towards violence or show how peer connections can prevent situations from escalating.

This viral reality TV show is a case study in social exclusion, in-group/out-group conflicts, emotional regulation, and the power of personal narratives.

06/05/2025

Ep 43. Forensic psychologist explains the Nashville school shooter's journals

Last week the FBI released 112 pages of handwritten journal entries from the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, TN in March 2023.

Last week the FBI released 112 pages of handwritten journal entries from the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, TN in March 2023.

05/31/2025

Me: Dallas ISD has said, "we're going to put an armed guardian at every single door to this campus". Well, what happens when somebody comes to that door? Is the guardian just supposed to shoot anybody who surprises them at the door? Because if it's a planned attack... they are going to be wrong if they didn't shoot. If it's not, they're going to be wrong for shooting. We're putting people in such a hard situation.

Officer Seth Capps: No, it's not a hard situation. A hard situation is when somebody cuts you off at the gas pump. This is an impossible situation where you're putting this not just safety, but life and death.

Let that sink in. When a student pulls a gun from their backpack inside a classroom and an armed teacher needs to decide if they are going to a) shoot the student with the gun, b) risk hitting the other students, and c) trust their perception is correct and it's a real gun, they are in an impossible situation.

Office Capps provides a very realistic assessment that no school staffer wants to shooter their student but state legislation in Texas mandates having armed staff on campus without funding or training to support it. Minneola ISD's framework is way to meet the mandate while reducing the risk to students from having an untraining or unqualified person around them with a gun.

https://k12ssdb.substack.com/p/ep-42-school-policing-in-texas-is

05/09/2025

Freakonomics Radio just re-released my interview from the 2023 series on failure.

Episode 561: How to Succeed at Failing, Part 1: The Chain of Events (Update)

We tend to think of tragedies as a single terrible moment, rather than the result of multiple bad decisions. Can this pattern be reversed? We try — with stories about wildfires, school shootings, and love.

05/08/2025

A Philadelphia police officer is in critically condition after being shot during a large fight outside Overbrook High School at dismissal.

At 2:45pm yesterday, officers called for backup to break-up a fight between dozens of students. During the fight, a 30-year-old man fired a AR-style pistol. A rifle caliber round ricocheted off the ground and stuck under an officer's vest.

In a statement, the School District of Philadelphia expressed its well wishes for the injured officer and said all after-school programming would be canceled.

According to statistics from the Philadelphia Police Department, there have been 26 shootings within a quarter-mile radius of where the officer was shot since 2015.

04/27/2025

When there are 98,000 public schools in the United States, why do some campuses have multiple shootings while the vast majority have zero?

Somehow 214 schools have had two or more shootings on campus since the 1960s. 42 schools have three or more shootings! This means that these 42 schools account for almost 5% of all shootings that I’ve recorded nationwide.

This happens because gun violence isn’t equally distributed.

Shootings happen more often in ‘unforgiving places’. These unforgiving schools are in neighborhoods that are above the national average poverty rate, above the national average in crime, and below the national average for graduation rate.

Looking at the situation leading to a shooting on campus, escalations of disputes are by far the most common circumstance at the schools with 2 or more incidents.

For example, this week in Memphis, TN, three gunmen in ski masks killed two male students outside Booker T. Washington High in Memphis at dismissal. Around 3pm, a car pulled onto the street in front of the school. Three masked people with automatic rifles got out and opened fire on the students.

In an interview with local news, an adult man said “there’s nothing open around there, there is nowhere for the kids to go”. A student who knew the victims said “everybody is beefing” and kids are carrying guns instead of having a place to play. That sounds like an unforgiving place.

When there are 98,000 public schools in the United States, why do some campuses have multiple shootings while the vast majority have zero?

04/18/2025

Hours before I planned to publish an article that I've been working on for months, there was another school shooting at Florida State University. Just two days prior, there was a mass shooting at a Dallas high school.

FSU immediately hit the target for non-stop network news coverage. There were videos of students running and bleeding bodies. There was "unspeakable horror" to talk about.

In 1999, TIME magazine printed a cover with smiling color photos of the Columbine school shooters surrounded by the partially obscured images of their victims in tiny black and white thumbnails. This overt glorification of these teenage boys is excused by one word in all caps and bright red: MONSTERS.

The word "monster" carries a complex and multifaceted history, rooted in both etymological origins and cultural symbolism. Its evolution connects to ideas of critique, demonstration, and revelation, while also carrying religious connotations that blur the boundaries between fear, reverence, and warning.

On Good Friday, we need to examine what this word really means. The Latin root monstro (to show, to point out, to advise, or to teach) also gives us the word "monstrance" in Catholic tradition. A monstrance is a sacred vessel used to display the consecrated Eucharist bread in a way that makes the host (bread) visible to the congregation. The monstrance functions as an instrument of revelation by holding up a symbol of the divine for all to witness.

This religious context adds a double-edged dimension to the term "monster." On one hand, the monstrance reveals the holy, the divine, and the good. But on the other hand, the "monster" defies both conventional form and social conformity. This reveals the dual nature of the monstrous: something that simultaneously attracts and repels. The monster draws attention to itself while serving as a warning of some underlying moral or existential crisis.

https://k12ssdb.substack.com/p/columbines-monsters-next-door-and