School shootings—terrifying to students, educators, parents, and communities—always reignite polarizing debates about gun rights and school safety. To bring context to these debates, Education Week journalists began tracking shootings on K-12 school property that resulted in firearm-related injuries or deaths.
In 2022, we continue this heartbreaking, but important work. More information about this tracker and our methodology is below.
There have been 27 school shootings this year. There have been 119 school shootings since 2018, when Education Week began tracking such incidents. The highest number of shootings, 34, occurred last year. There were 10 shootings in 2020, and 24 each in 2019 and 2018.
Latest Situation
On May 24, 19 children and two adults were killed and 16 injured in a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. It was the deadliest school shooting since 2012, when a gunman shot and killed 26 people as young as 6 years old at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Fatalities exceeded those in the 2018 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., which left 17 dead. The assailant also shot and injured his grandmother at her home prior to the incident. Read more.
Injuries & Deaths
Where the Shootings Happened
The size of the dots correlates to the number of people killed or injured. Click on each dot for more information.
About the Shootings
Click on the column names to sort the data.
A previous version of this table included the age, sex, and status of the suspect(s). We are no longer tracking that information.
Contact Information
For media or research inquiries about this data, contact library@educationweek.org.
About This Tracker
In the emotionally charged aftermath of school shootings, politicians, activists, news media, and ordinary citizens often cite statistics that can present a distorted view of how many of these incidents occur. Those statistics are used to fuel ongoing debates about gun control, arming teachers, and school security.
With this tracker, Education Week aims to provide a clear accounting of K-12 school shootings. There is no single right way of calculating numbers like this, and the human toll in the immediate aftermath and long term is impossible to measure. We hope to provide reliable information to help inform discussions, debates, and solutions.
Methodology
Counting Incidents
This page refers to incidents that meet all the following criteria:
- where a firearm was discharged,
- where any individual, other than the suspect or perpetrator, has a bullet wound resulting from the incident,
- that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus, and
- that occur while school is in session or during a school-sponsored event.
We do not track incidents in which the only shots fired were from an individual authorized to carry a gun, such as a school resource officer, and who did so in their official capacity.
The numbers of incidents, injuries, and deaths reported in this tracker do not include suicides or self-inflicted injuries. While suicides and attempted suicides are serious issues of health and safety, many of the critical questions and debates that those incidents raise for educators and the broader public are often distinct from those generated by school shootings.
Counting Injuries & Deaths
Injuries included in this tracker may be major or minor. While we only track incidents resulting in at least one bullet wound, total injuries are not necessarily the result of gunfire.
The total number of people killed or injured does not include the suspect or perpetrator.
Sources
In addition to our own reporting, we rely on local news outlets, school and district websites, news alerts via online search engines, the Gun Violence Archive, and the Center for Homeland Defense and Security’s Naval Postgraduate School’s K-12 School Shooting database.
How to Cite This Page
School Shootings This Year: How Many and Where (2022, January 5). Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year-how-many-and-where/2022/01
