Page 19 - Campus Security & Life Safety, September/October 2022

hensive list of the incidents. Lists of shootings reported by the media identify many incidents but provide few details beyond dates and locations. Databases of school shootings on blogs and crowd-sourced websites have extensive lists of school shootings but lack citations to primary sources. Without a common methodology for data collec- tion, individual data sources are limited in both validity and utility.
The K-12 School Shooting Database remedies this void by captur- ing more than 2,060 incidents from 1970 to the present in which a gun was brandished or fired, or a bullet hit school property for any reason. This definition, which is deliberately broad, enables users to
By David Riedman
Deciding that something is a mass shooting’ based on four fatalities is utterly arbitrary. Mass public violence is about the intent to kill as many people as possible, just like terrorism is the intent to send a message through violence. If a bomb in a marketplace kills two people instead of 200, is it not terrorism because there weren’t enough victims? The number 4 doesn’t magically render a shooting important.
decide what data is important to answer their questions and make better-informed decisions about school safety. The database’s objec- tive is to systematically record every time shots are fired at a school because there is value in being able to collectively study every differ- ent type of incident. For example, a student shot in the hallway by a deranged former-student shooter suffers the same injury as a student bystander struck in the chest by the crossfire of a gang-dispute shoot- ing in the cafeteria. The 8-year-old girl killed during one of the 50 shootings in 2021-22 at high-school football and basketball games is the same age as the children murdered inside their classroom in Uvalde. Shootings on school campuses outside of traditional school hours have significant consequences on students and the community.
Inversely, brandishing—such as those instances where the shooter initially made threatening gestures with a firearm, but was stopped prior to getting off a shot—are also included in the K-12 SSDB. It’s important to study all the factors leading up to a student intent to commit a shooting before a last-second weapon malfunction or being tackled by a bystander. Although often excluded from other national reports, which focus solely on injuries or deaths, these “near misses” offer significant research opportunities because a greater loss of life could have occurred. Near misses can also offer an opportunity to highlight what went right in preventing an incident from having a greater loss of life.
The K-12 SSDB includes detailed information about each incident including when (e.g., morning classes, lunch, sporting event), where (e.g., hallway, classroom, gym, parking lot), and why shots were fired (e.g., indiscriminate attack, suicide, escalation of dispute, illegal activ- ity). To better understand who was involved, the age, demographics,
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