Page 78 - Security Today, September/October 2022

Why Every Gunshot at a School Matters
Active Shooter
Asniper in a fifth-story apartment fires 300 shots at a school just before dismissal. He had multiple automatic rifles and 1,000 rounds. Government reports wouldn’t consider this worst- case scenario attack to be a “mass shooting”—or even a “school shooting.” That’s a problem.
What is the K-12 School Shooting Database?
Uvalde was one of the worst school shootings in history. We hear that, but how do we know it? Prior to the creation of the K-12 School Shooting Database (k12ssdb.org) after Parkland in 2018, this was a
difficult question to answer.
Prior to this database, the landscape of publicly available informa-
tion compiled on school shootings arose from a wealth of sources including peer-reviewed studies, government reports, archived news- papers, mainstream media, non-profit entities, private websites, per- sonal blogs, and crowd-sourced lists. Individually, however, these platforms failed to capture the magnitude of the problem. For exam- ple, government reports on school shootings by the U.S. Secret Ser- vice, FBI, and Department of Education provide an explanation of factors contributing to shootings, but they do not catalog a compre-
18 campuslifesecurity.com | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022