How many school shootings in 2025?

Both the number of incidents and the number of victims continues to decline from the post-COVID peak. My analysis estimates how many shootings and active shooter attacks will happen in 2026.

The end of 2025 brings a final count of 232 shootings at k-12 schools with 204 victims who were killed or wounded.

Both the number of shootings (blue) and the number of victims (green) are significant reductions from the post-COVID closure peak.

Here is the breakdown by state with the number of shootings in 2025 per 100,000 enrolled k-12 school students. Washington, DC has by far the highest rate of shootings compared to the student population. This makes sense when DC only has 50,839 students enrolled in a city that is a densely populated urban area with a relatively high rate of gun violence.

Mississippi, Delaware, Tennessee, and Maryland round out the top 5. Florida, which has five of the ten largest school districts in the country, has the lowest rate of shootings per student population.

Below in gray color is a composite index calculated by normalizing annual incident counts and annual victim totals separately to a 0–1 scale (dividing each by its historical maximum), and then averaging the two normalized values with equal weight. This produced a single yearly measure that captures both the frequency of events and the severity of harm without allowing either dimension to dominate the trend on its original scale.

So why was there a sharp decrease in 2025? I don’t know. Crime trends are something that needs to be measured across decades to see patterns (which conflicting research shows we don’t really understand at all). I see articles about averted attacks, threats, and students arrested with guns on campus every single day so the potential for a bad outcome is constantly present.

2025 ‘active shooter’ attacks

As I’ve written many times, ‘active shooter’ is an invented term that doesn’t have a legal or standard definition. It’s generally used to describe some type of deliberate shooting that isn’t related to disputes, domestic violence, drugs, gangs, and random gunfire (e.g., drive-by shooting).

Below is a composite measure with an equal-weighted average of the yearly proportion of incidents classified as ‘active shooter’ and the yearly proportion of victims from those attacks. This measure combines how often active shooter incidents occur with how severe they are into a single normalized index. As you can see from the chart, this trend line has a significant upward trajectory (even with billions invested into fortifying schools).