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Only one of their children survived Sandy Hook. Now school posed a new threat: The virus.

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In the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High massacre on Feb. 14, 2018, my colleague Steven Rich and I reported for the first time how many children in the United States had endured a shooting at a K-12 school since 1999, and the tally was far higher than what we expected: more than 187,000.

The Washington Post ran that figure in huge type atop its front page on the day that survivors of the Parkland, Fla., shooting held a massive <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/march-for-our-lives-in-photos/" target=_blank>March for Our Lives rally</a> in D.C., where tens of thousands of other young people joined them. Throughout the sprawling crowd, demonstrators held up copies of The Post, a tangible illustration of the crisis’s catastrophic scope.

Now, just five years later, and despite a pandemic that closed many campuses for nearly a year, the number has exploded, climbing past 338,000.

The Washington Post’s school shooting database: Tracking the number of kids impacted since Columbine.

We know that because we’ve continued to maintain a unique <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-shootings-database/" target=_blank>database </a>that tracks the total number of children exposed to gun violence at school, as well as other vital details, including the number of people killed and injured; the age, sex, race and gender of the accused shooters; the types and sources of their weapons; the demographic makeup of the schools; the presence of armed security guards; the random, targeted or accidental nature of the shootings.

Neither of us anticipated that we would still be doing this work in 2023 — on Parkland’s fifth anniversary — but it’s never been more urgent. The subject of school shootings often makes people feel hopeless, especially at a time when America is experiencing its worst stretch in history. But we have now studied 366 separate incidents of campus gun violence, and the data, along with dozens of stories on the damaged children it represents, has taught us that there are reasons to remain hopeful, none more so than this one: Most school shootings are preventable.

That’s just one of the lessons we’ve learned about a singularly American epidemic.

Ricky Carioti

Our database wouldn’t exist if not for a school shooting that almost no one remembers.

More than a year before Parkland, a 14-year-old boy in rural South Carolina took a handgun from his father’s dresser and killed him with it. Then the teenager drove to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2017/06/09/run-gunfire-on-a-school-playground-still-haunts-the-first-graders-who-survived/" target=_blank>Townville Elementary</a> and opened fire on a playground scattered with first-graders. His gun jammed 12 seconds after he fired the first round, but by then, he had already shot a teacher and two students, including Jacob Hall, the smallest kid in his class. Jacob, who was 6, died three days later.

The story quickly faded from the national news because only a single child died, but when I traveled to Townville, I heard not about one victim, but hundreds.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/john-woodrow-cox/" target=_blank>John Woodrow Cox</a> has been reporting on children and gun violence for six years and is the author of an award-winning book on the subject, <a href="https://amzn.to/3RPyuVz" target=_blank>“Children Under Fire: An American Crisis.”</a> He strives to tell his stories from the perspective of the kids he writes about, not the adults around them. He began building The Post’s school shootings database in 2017.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/steven-rich/" target=_blank>Steven Rich </a>has been reporting on school shootings for more than five years. A data reporter at The Post, Rich brings a data-based approach to stories, helping readers understand the extent of the issues he reports on. He is the architect behind The Post’s school shootings database, designing a data set with 50 data points for each shooting so that the public can best understand every aspect of the issue.

Siena Kibilko, a first-grader who’d also been on the playground, began locking all the doors at her house and dropping to the ground when she heard loud noises. Jacob’s friend, Karson Robinson, was stricken with guilt, convinced that he should have saved Jacob’s life. For the following Valentine’s Day, Karson wrote a card in his memory: “I loved him but he diyd but he is stil a life in my hart.”

The torment extended beyond the kids closest to Jacob. Children who had been inside the school — who didn’t see or hear anything — were long consumed with fear and anxiety.

“Noises are different now,” Townville Principal Denise Fredericks told me six months after the shooting, recalling the panic that ensued when a balloon popped at a school dance.

Fredericks banned balloons at the spring festival that year — and now, six years later, she won’t allow them this spring either. Her students haven’t forgotten what happened in those 12 seconds. Some of them still ask to talk to her about it.

“Our recovery,” she said, “it’s not a linear thing.”

Steven Rich

John Woodrow Cox

Emma Grazado

Jillian Banner

My first trip there was revelatory because it made clear that the vast majority of Americans fundamentally misunderstood the scope of this problem.

Each shooting becomes synonymous with its death toll, the lone figure most people remember. At Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., it was 13. At Marjory Stoneman Douglas: 17. At Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex.: 21. At Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn.: 26.

After reporting in Townville, I began trying to add up how many children Siena and Karson represented, poring through thousands of news stories to identify every shooting I could find dating back to the Columbine attack in April 1999. My colleague Steven, a database editor, soon joined the effort, expanding the areas we tracked and analyzed.

For reasons that researchers are still trying to understand, gun violence soared during the pandemic, a trend that spilled onto K-12 campuses when many of them reopened in the spring of 2021.

By nearly every meaningful measure, 2022 was the worst year of school shootings in history. Across 46 acts of violence during school hours, 34 students and adults died while more than 43,000 children were exposed to gunfire at the places they go to learn and grow.

That final, often invisible group has remained our focus because of kids like Jaydien Canizales, who was 9 on the day in May that a man with a semiautomatic rifle walked into his fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary. Jaydien hid under a table, watching the massacre of his teachers and classmates through a black cloth.

Still, he is not legally considered a victim of anything.

“One of my cousins, the cops dragged him in the hallway when they were taking us out. I saw the bullet in his head,” he said in an interview. “I lost some of my closest friends. All my best friends.”

Sergio Flores

That is, statistically, true, in the sense that a child is highly unlikely to experience one. But it’s also an assertion that infuriates many people, and for good reason. Are school shootings in the United States “rare” compared with the number in, say, Canada or England or Germany or any other developed nation? No, they are not.

Our database also excludes hundreds of incidents every year that don’t technically qualify but that still terrify and traumatize tens of thousands of children: shootings at after-school sporting events, for example, or gunshots fired just off campus.

And almost no students can escape the reminders that someone could open fire in their classrooms at any moment. In a country where gun violence is now the leading cause of death for kids and teens, millions of children must walk through metal detectors or run through active-shooter drills meant to prepare them for the threat of mass murder. <a href="https://www.nasro.org/faq/#:~:text=The%20National%20Association%20of%20School,SROs%20that%20NASRO%20has%20trained." target=_blank>By one estimate</a>, school systems employ as many as 20,000 resource officers nationwide in an effort to keep their buildings safe.

We often get emails from men of a certain age who suggest that the drills children participate in now are no worse than what they experienced during the Cold War.

“I remember school drills where we were taught how to survive a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union,” one man wrote, adding that “back then everyone was stoic and there was no social media to incite mass hysteria.”

The difference, of course, is that the Russians never dropped nukes on kids in Newtown or Parkland or Uvalde. For students today, the threat is not theoretical. They have seen and heard about children just like them who were shot dead in classrooms just like theirs.

Whether drills harm students more than they help them remains a point of debate — one that demands more research — but because there are no universally followed best practices, schools take dramatically different, and sometimes haphazard, approaches to prepping students for potential danger.

Ten months after Parkland, on a Florida campus 200 miles north, <a href="https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-ne-lake-brantley-code-red-drill-20181206-story.html" target="_blank">Lake Brantley High declared</a> a “code red” emergency over the intercom, indicating that the 2,700-student campus faced immediate danger.

“Active Shooter reported at Brantley,” read a text sent to teachers. “Initiate a Code Red Lockdown.”

Students wept, had asthma attacks, messaged parents goodbye — but the threat wasn’t real. It had been a drill, kept secret “so people will take it seriously,” a spokesman later argued, insisting it was “the only way to get their attention.”

In October, during a drill at <a href="https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2022/10/20/jacksonville-mom-says-son-traumatized-after-active-shooter-drill-left-him-locked-out-of-classroom/" target=_blank>another school in Florida</a>, a teacher was accused of locking a fifth-grader out of his classroom, forcing the boy to hide in a bathroom stall where he feared the shooter (who did not exist) would find and kill him. <a href="https://khn.org/news/article/texas-active-shooter-drills-schools-trauma/" target=_blank>The same month</a>, parents of grade-schoolers in Texas complained that mishandled drills had left their children wetting the bed and begging for special locks to keep “bad adults” out of their bedrooms.

And then there’s the consequence of school shootings that could never be described as rare: actual lockdowns.

In the 2017-2018 school year, we found that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-lockdowns-in-america/" target=_blank>more than 4.1 million children</a> suffered through at least one of them — and nearly 60 percent were caused by gun violence or the threat of it.

‘Scared to death’: More than 4 million children endured lockdowns in the 2017-2018 school year

To complete the first-of-its-kind analysis, Steven reviewed 20,000 news stories, and we collected data from school districts in 31 of the country’s largest cities, but our tally was almost certainly a severe undercount. Many school districts do not track lockdowns, and hundreds never make the news, particularly when they happen at urban schools attended primarily by children of color.

The sudden order to hide in silence from a potential intruder can panic students, who have wept and soiled themselves, written farewell messages to family members and pleaded with parents to save them before they were killed.

“This is a clear and pressing public health issue,” Steven Schlozman, a child psychiatrist and associate professor at Dartmouth College, told us at the time. “We have very good data that children in proximity to frightening circumstances, such as those that trigger school lockdowns, are at risk for lasting symptoms. These include everything from worsening academic and social progression to depression, anxiety, poor sleep, post-traumatic symptomatology and substance abuse.”

In one case, at a school in Charlotte, a 12-year-old boy was so overcome with dread that he wrote a will, scribbling his home address and his mom’s name at the top of the page.

“I am sorry for anything I have done,” he wrote.

“I hope that you are going to be ok with me gone.”

To many Americans, the Columbine students who opened fire on their classmates still embody the archetypal school shooter. One was 17, the other 18. Both were White and angry and heavily armed. They lived in the suburbs and admired the Nazis. They planned their attack in great detail, but killed at random.

Another notion — that they were <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/04/19/bullies-black-trench-coats-columbine-shootings-most-dangerous-myths/" target=_blank>bullied loners</a> motivated by revenge — has also persisted in popular culture, despite years of reporting that refutes those rumors.

Bullies and black trench coats: The Columbine shooting’s most dangerous myths

Between then and now, we’ve assessed another 300-plus shooters and can say with certainty that there is no archetype.

The three youngest in our database were all <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/01/11/elementary-students-guns-fired-school/?itid=ap_johnwoodrowcox" target="_blank">6 years old</a>, and two of them pulled their triggers on purpose. One killed a classmate in Michigan 23 years ago, and the other was accused of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/01/25/richneck-elementary-shooting-teacher-attorney-speaks/?itid=ap_justinjouvenal" target="_blank">firing a bullet into his teacher’s chest</a> in Virginia last month.

The oldest was 74, a substitute <a href="https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2019/03/gun-in-pocket-of-72-year-old-substitute-teacher-discharges-in-1st-grade-alabama-classroom.html" target=_blank>teacher in Alabama</a> who brought a handgun to a first-grade class in 2019 and unintentionally fired it in his pocket, injuring a student.

There have also been at least a dozen female shooters, including <a href="https://www.idahostatejournal.com/freeaccess/worst-nightmare-sixth-grade-girl-shoots-two-students-custodian-at-east-idaho-school/article_adae568a-3850-5587-a6e2-a2d94668d077.html" target=_blank>a sixth-grader</a> who wounded three people at her Idaho middle school and <a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/glendale/2016/02/26/glendale-police-submit-charge-against-teen-who-provided-gun-independence-high-school-classmate/81006722/" target=_blank>a sophomore</a> who killed her girlfriend, then herself, at their Arizona high school.

Many shooters do share similar attributes, though. Their median age is 16, and nearly all — 96 percent — are male. Unlike the Columbine killers, most intend to harm specific people, and the overwhelming majority show no signs of debilitating mental illness, such as psychosis or schizophrenia.

Inside an accused school shooter’s mind: A plot to kill ‘50 or 60. If I get lucky maybe 150.’

We’re not always provided an assailant’s demographic background, but among those we do know, the shooter’s race almost always reflects the campus’s population, with White shooters firing in predominantly White schools and Black shooters firing in predominantly Black ones.

The 10 worst assaults account for 57 percent of the entire death toll since 1999, and all but two of them were committed by White attackers, a reality that has left much of the public with the false impression that school shootings almost exclusively affect White students.

Children of color, however, are far more likely to experience campus gun violence: more than twice as much for Hispanic students and over three times as much for Black students.

The worst incidents — most commonly carried out with semiautomatic rifles or shotguns — have also distorted people’s understanding of what attackers tend to use. Among the cases in which authorities identified the firearm, a single handgun is the weapon of choice 80 percent of the time.

But no data point about shooters and their guns has been more revelatory than where the former group obtains the latter.

A teen calmly shot 16 classmates, police say. Is his stepfather also to blame? 

We have reviewed 181 shootings committed by children since Columbine, and within that group, we found 132 cases in which the weapons’ sources were made public.

The young would-be shooters rarely bought firearms on the street or stole them from strangers’ cars or houses, because they didn’t need to. In 86 percent of the cases we examined, the children found the guns in the homes of their friends, relatives or parents.

Joe Sohm/Visions of America

More gun laws. More armed guards. More metal detectors. More cameras. More bulletproof windows. More drills. More suspensions. More therapists. More prayers. More guns.

With every new shooting comes a new round of (mostly old) ideas on how to stop them.

Until this past summer, when Congress passed a gun-safety bill for the first time in decades, federal lawmakers had done virtually nothing to address the problem, and it could take years to determine whether their recent effort makes any difference.

State legislators, mostly in blue states, have made incremental changes to their regulations, but shootings continue to happen in every type of community, regardless of politics, economics or geography.

As a consequence, the onus to keep children safe has largely fallen on the schools themselves. The result? A private industry that brings in <a href="https://marketbrief.edweek.org/marketplace-k-12/spending-school-security-tops-3-billion-focus-new-surveillance-tech/" target="_blank">$3.1 billion</a> a year selling largely unproven security systems to districts desperate to do something.

After Parkland, I traveled to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-shootings-and-campus-safety-industry/" target=_blank>a school security conference</a> in Orlando where entrepreneurs from across the country had converged, hoping to capitalize on a panic that had ballooned safety budgets.

Cassi Alexandra

Among the items being peddled: a $2,900 ballistic whiteboard — adorned with adorable animal illustrations and pocked with five bullet holes — that weighed 300 pounds; a $4,000 armored classroom door that could allegedly stop bullets, identify the weapon, photograph the shooter and notify police; a $500,000 door security system designed to detect students smuggling weapons.

The developer of that system, Justin Kuhn, argued that, if school officials really valued their students’ lives, they should have no problem paying his asking price. He had already divided the total cost of his product by the number of people (17) killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

“That’s $29,000 a kid,” he said. “Every person would pay $29,000 a kid to have their kid alive.”

But neither Kuhn nor almost any other vendor could prove their products would save a kid’s life.

We know, too, that dozens of shootings have happened at schools protected by armed security guards. In fact, across 366 shootings, we have identified just two instances in which a resource officer gunned down an active shooter. To put that in perspective, at least nine shootings have been halted by malfunctioning weapons or by the attacker’s inability to handle them.

In a country with more guns than people, it may be impossible to stop every act of campus violence, but with a few simple, straightforward steps, it is possible to substantially reduce an annual total that has cracked 40 two years in a row.

Every school should be able to quickly lock its doors, a basic security function that has consistently saved lives but that many campuses still lack. At Robb Elementary, teachers couldn’t secure their classrooms from the inside, a problem that thousands of <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_233.50.asp?current=yes" target=_blank>public schools continue to face</a>.

Of course, the best way to save lives is to stop potential attackers before they ever reach campus. We once surveyed schools that had experienced shootings, and several told us that only one thing could have made a difference: a tip from someone who knew it might happen. And many people do know, because shooters tend to talk about their plans.

Children Under Fire: An American Crisis

John Woodrow Cox is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. He is the author of Children Under Fire:
An American Crisis and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.

Pulitzer Prize for national reporting (2016) and public service (2014)

Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for public service (2023, 2020) and explanatory reporting (2019)

Peabody Award (2022 and 2017)

George Polk Award for medical reporting (2016) and national reporting (2015)

Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for domestic print (2014)

Gerald Loeb Award for large newspapers (2014)

National Edward R. Murrow Award for podcast (2021) and investigative reporting (2018 and 2015)

Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative reporting (2017 and 2016) and public service (2015) 

Associated Press Sports Editors for explanatory reporting (2017) and investigative reporting (2015) 

News Leaders Association O'Brien Fellowship Award for Impact in Public Service Journalism (2020)

American Society of News Editors for local accountability reporting (2014)

Online News Association University of Florida Award for Investigative Data Journalism, Large Newsroom (2022)

Virginia Tech, BA in Communication

University of Missouri, MA in Journalism

Steven Rich is the database editor for investigations at The Washington Post. He was a reporter on two teams to win Pulitzer Prizes, for public service in 2014 and national reporting in 2016, and two to teams to win Peabody Awards, in 2017 and 2022.

washpost

After Parkland: School shootings affect soaring number of kids 

the-washington-post

Nam Y. Huh

What we've learned in the 5 years after Parkland. Our analysis found a huge rise in U.S. students exposed to gun violence

What we've learned in the 5 years after Parkland

Feature - Washington, DC

Matt McClain is a staff photojournalist at The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, he was a staff photographer at the Ventura County Star in Ventura, Calif., and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.

After Parkland: What we’ve learned tracking school shootings for 5 years