When a student opened fire at her Detroit high school in November 2021, killing four students and injuring seven others, Rebekah Schuler let go of the idea of ever feeling truly safe in school again.
“We're being forced to normalize learning amid a constant fear of guns ringing inside or outside of our classrooms,” said Schuler, 18, a senior at Oxford, the site of one among a record 188 school shootings during the 2021-22 academic year.
That year’s count of school shootings was the highest in more than two decades, according to a federal report released this month. During the previous year, there were half that number of school shootings — 93 — noted the report, the U.S. Department of Education’s latest tally of that gun violence but also of in-school suicides, bullying and other kinds of victimization of pupils and educators.
After retail and other business settings, educational settings were the second most common location of active shooter incidents, researchers found.
The school shooting data underlay a hard reality, say youth who’ve survived them or endured the threat of one: Shootings have become an accepted risk of school life.
“It's always in the back of your head because it’s such a common thing now,” said Gray Collins, 13, of Lakeside Middle School in Charlottesville, Virginia. “Someone will drop something loud or you hear screams in the building, and your mind immediately goes, ‘There’s a shooter.’”
Two-thirds of ‘active shooters’ were 12 to 18 years old
That federal agency’s Institute of Education Sciences report also found that between the 2000-01 and 2020-21 school years:
- The number of school shootings with casualties ranged from 11 to 93 annually.
- There was a subset of 46 active-shooter incidents — with “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area,” as the FBI defines it — at elementary and secondary schools.
- Those shooters wounded 276 people, 108 of them fatally.
- Thirty-four — or more than two-thirds — of shooters were 12 to 18 years old. Five were aged 19 to 24 and eight were at least 25.
The report does not describe how many of the 2021-22 school year’s 188 casualties involved active shooters.
As of 2019-20, 96% of public schools had a written plan for procedures to follow in an active shooter situation, researchers wrote.
Daniel Webster, a researcher at the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins, links the study’s findings to what he argues are several troubling factors.
“Kids have greater access to firearms than was the case prior to the pandemic,” said Webster, a Council on Criminal Justice member, citing record gun sales during COVID-19.
“There’s more privately made firearms out there … and 26 states that don't even require you to get a license or permit to carry a loaded gun around with you.” (By “privately made,” he meant “ghost guns” made from kits that can be obtained by ordering online; 13 states, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, regulate ghost gun sales.)
While gun sales have declined as the pandemic has wound down, many children's access to firearms has remained steady. A Northeastern University analysis of the 2021 National Firearms Survey, published in JAMA in 2022, found that 4.6 million U.S. children live in a household with loaded and unlocked firearms. And a University of Colorado Injury & Violence Prevention Center analysis, published in JAMA in March 2023, found that 32% of more than 41,000 Colorado teens reported they could get access to a loaded gun within 24 hours; and 12% could do so within 10 minutes. Among students in rural areas and towns, almost 40% reported access to firearms, with 17% reporting access in under 10 minutes.
In a study published in 2021, Clemson University researchers found that males accounted for 95% of school shooters between 2001 and 2017. Almost half suffered a psychological disorder and felt rejected by family and peers.
“Adolescence is a time of great impulsivity, and not a lot of forethought for the consequences for what you're doing,” Webster said. “So, you have males today who are not supported in a way that they need to be, who feel aggrieved and feel justified to acquire a gun for a use that is often criminal and violent.
Heightened safety and surveillance may not stop shooters, students fear
A teenage boy was the shooter last November at that Detroit high school in 2021, where, senior Schuler said, showing up for class is a struggle.
“It's been tricky to find motivation and to find enjoyment,” said Schuler, now a volunteer with Students Demand Action.
After that shooting, she was diagnosed with PTSD, which made her feel so overwhelmed that she sometimes missed school assignments. Her grades, she said, suffered, dropping from an A average to a B-, as she tried to cope with a fairly constant anxiety, though she is now doing better.
For Gray Collins, of Virginia, a rumor last year of a threatened school shooting in Charlottesville, allegedly posted online, turned out to be a hoax. Still, it caused panic at the time and remains a source of ongoing stress for them and many of their classmates.
The showcasing on social media of gun violence in schools makes things worse, they said.
“You can see clips of someone walking into a school and shooting kids with an AR,” said Gray, giving the shorthand for an automatic rifle. “Seeing that makes you so much more aware, conscious and scared.”
Both students laud safety steps taken at their own schools, including updated weapons detectors, security teams, lockdown drills and increased video surveillance. But those measures do little to ease their fears, they said.
“If the shooter’s a student, they're going to know how the drills work and where to go. So, it just feels like setting us up for failure,” Gray said.
“Just because Oxford is safer than ever,” Schuler said, “and there may not be a second shooting there, doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t happen to other friends in neighboring school districts.”
The federal researchers caution against interpreting last year’s spike in school shootings as an indicator of a pattern because the presented data is still an outlier compared to prior years.
One data point is not a trend, Johns Hopkins’ Weber said.
“But,” he added, “all the indicators of what’s going on broadly with teens today are troubling to me, and this may just be the beginning.”
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Isidoro Rodriguez is a Brooklyn, New York-based reporter who covers police reform and misconduct, juvenile justice, gun violence and sex work.