Four ways school shootings are averted
My new paper in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence explores the four most common pathways to stop a school shooting plot before it occurs. They require building trust over fortifying buildings.
After multiple years in the peer review process (yes, years), my coauthored paper on averting school shootings is finally out. The findings in this paper are based on the free and open access averted school shooting tracker on my website.
Stopping Violence Before It Starts: An Analysis of How Potential School Gun Attacks Are Exposed
Academic abstract: Gun violence in U.S. schools continues to be a persistent concern. A promising line of scholarship focuses on potential school gun attacks that were stopped before they could occur, but this work is limited to a small number of studies. This study investigates how potential school gun attacks were exposed by analyzing 124 publicly reported cases from 2018 to 2023. For the analysis, we generated descriptive data on the school contexts, individuals, and processes associated with exposing potential school gun attacks both on and off school grounds. Findings indicated that in most cases, suspects communicated their intentions, which created opportunities for exposing potential attacks. Students were the most common source for exposure, reporting 42% of cases, while teachers, parents, and community members played smaller but important roles. To illustrate the interacting factors behind exposing a potential attack, we further describe four recurring scenarios: public signaling of intent, private disclosures to confidants, discovery of written plans or private communications, and detection through safety measures. These pathways to exposing a threat suggest that positive relationships in schools, open lines of communication, and high expectations for reporting serious threats may be central to averting school gun attacks.
Plain language version of the findings
We analyzed 124 publicly reported cases of potential school gun attacks from 2018 to 2023. The goal was to move beyond profiling shooters and instead understand the mechanisms of exposure to analyze how plots are detected and stopped. In each of the averted cases, there was intent, planning, and/or efforts to obtain weapons/ammo. These cases are not jokes, hoaxes, or empty threats.
We identified four recurring scenarios for how these attack plots were uncovered:
Public signaling: Suspects post online, adopt the aesthetics of prior shooters, make threats in public spaces. Peers are usually the first to notice and report.
Private disclosures: Suspects tell a friend, a co-worker, a family member. The co-conspirator or confidant is then the critical link to authorities. In a case in Oklahoma, a suspect told a co-worker she had purchased an AR-15 and planned to attack the school that expelled her. The co-worker called police.
Discovery of plans: Parents find journals, students overhear conversations in bathrooms, group chats leak to someone outside the inner circle. In a Washington state case, a mother found her son’s written plan to shoot up his school on the Columbine anniversary. A prior positive relationship with the school resource officer was credited with giving her the confidence to report it.
Detection through formal safety systems: Police, FBI, or school security personnel observe suspicious behavior or receive tips through formal channels like a reporting app.
Across 124 cases, students were the primary source for exposing a school shooting plot in 42% of incidents. School administrators were involved in 17% of cases. School resource officers (who are present in nearly half of all public schools) played a role in just 15% of averted cases. Physical security measures like search and seizure accounted for 6%. Anonymous tip lines came in at 10%.
In 54% of cases stopped off school grounds, the suspect had either posted about their plans online or sent text messages about them. In total, 51% of suspects produced some form of written threat before being caught.
Students are most likely to know about a planned attack before it happens. Whether they report it depends on whether they trust the adults around them, whether there’s a clear and accessible way to report it, and whether the school culture treats reporting as a norm rather than snitching.
The findings of this study provide suggestive evidence that the willingness of students and adults to come forward and report early warning signs may be critical to stopping school gun violence before it happens. To surface potential threats, it’s essential for schools to cultivate positive student-teacher relationships, a supportive school climate, and clear lines for reporting threats.
Full paper: Stopping Violence Before It Starts: An Analysis of How Potential School Gun Attacks Are Exposed
Previous podcast with my coauthor Dan Hamline: Ep 24. Understanding Different Forms of Gun Violence in American Schools
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my podcast—Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education & Security—or my interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.