Missing school shootings in the FBI's 2025 Active Shooter report
Following the patterns I've documented since 2023, the FBI continues to omit shootings that meet their definition of an 'active shooter' from their annual summary report.
According to the FBI, there were only four active shooters at schools in 2025. Two were at high schools and two were on college campuses. Using the FBI’s definition of an active shooter, I recorded eight attacks at just k-12 schools.
For example, the FBI didn’t categorize the attack at Annunciation School in Minneapolis as “education”. If someone uses the FBI report to analyze just school shootings, the two elementary school students who were killed and the 27 others who were wounded aren’t school shooting victims in the eyes of the Bureau. Counting victims in the correct category matters because these official reports drive policy and funding decisions across the country.
Unlike an academic institution with a peer-review process, the FBI is run by political appointees who make the final decisions about what to include/exclude and how to categorize them in their “Active Shooter Incidents in the United States” report.
Per the FBI’s definition on page 9, an “active shooter incident must involve a shooter or shooters using a firearm—whether they successfully discharge the weapon or merely attempt to do so while attempting to kill or harm people” (excluding gangs, drugs, domestics, self-defense, hostage situations, and shootings related to other criminal acts).
On page 15, the FBI report provides a short summary of each shooting:
Missing from this list is the worst school shooting in 2025. On August 27, a 23-year-old armed with an AR-15, shotgun, and handgun opened fire on the Annunciation School in Minneapolis during a morning prayer service attended by all students. Two kids were killed and 27 were wounded.
Other missing school shootings
These three incidents also meet the FBI’s active shooter definition yet they were not included in the 2025 report.
Pasadena Memorial High School (Pasadena, TX) – February 1, 2025. An elderly man opened fire in the school lobby during a high school drum team competition. He wounded a teacher and then was subdued by bystanders. He died in custody before the trial.
Lincoln Middle School (Berwyn, IL) – September 16, 2025. A man with an AR-15 rifle fired 30 shots at the front of the school during dismissal. The assistant principal and another person in a vehicle outside the school were killed. He committed suicide before police arrived.
Valdosta S.L. Mason Elementary (Valdosta, GA) – September 25, 2025. A man with a handgun opened fire on random vehicles in the pick-up line in front of the school at dismissal. As parents, staff, and students fled, the man was fatally shot by police officers.
Two other incidents could meet the FBI’s definition, but they involved replica firearms. During both incidents police believed the firearms were real because replica ‘toy’ guns are indistinguishable from real guns until close inspection.
Verplanck Elementary School (Manchester, CT) – January 13, 2025. A 17-year-old attempting a suicide-by-cop situation pointed a replica AR-15 at students and staff on the school playground. When students and staff fled to take shelter inside the school, he pointed the gun at classroom windows until police arrived. He was charged with 112 felony counts.
Wilson Elementary School (Fresno, CA) – August 28, 2025. A student pointed a replica handgun at staff in the school office causing a lockdown and 30-minute standoff with police. The incident ended when he surrendered during negotiations.
These replica firearms incidents are extremely serious. Here is the police body cam footage from Verplanck Elementary School.
Impact of the omissions and miscategorization
The most likely reason to underreport active shooters is to show a declining trend. That intent is pretty clear from the trendline added to this graphic on page 53.
Unlike an academic research center, the FBI is an agency run by political appointees with ideological and partisan agendas. In the case of the Annunciation School shooting, moving victims from ‘education’ to ‘house of worship’ bolsters a political agenda to downplay gun violence at schools and portray Christian-values as being under attack.
The shootings at Annunciation in Minneapolis, MN and Lincoln Middle in Berwyn, IL both involved AR-15 rifles. By omitting those incidents, it looks like AR-15s aren’t a problem anymore. What would be the motivation to omit shootings with these rifles? AR-15s are the highest profit margin firearm ever sold and the NRA donated more than $50,000,000 to the current president’s political campaigns. The president’s sons also have a ‘Amazon for guns’ business that bypasses the traditional in-person background checks and waiting periods that are proven to reduce firearm deaths.
The report also uses creative data representation to reiterate the myth that police officers are essential to ending shootings. In reality, very few shootings are ended by police. The most common outcomes are the shooters either kill themselves, are subdued by unarmed bystanders, flee from the scene, or put down their guns and surrender police arrive. On page 38:
In active shooter situations, law enforcement officers bear the responsibility of neutralizing the threat to keep the public safe.
In five of the 34 shootings in the FBI report, police either killed the shooter, or the shooter ended their life when police arrived. That means 85% of the active shooters ended without police intervention.
If you want to justify more funding for police agencies to purchase tactical rifles/gear and send officers to active shooter training (both of which transfer tax dollars to the firearms industry), it makes sense to overstate the impact police have on ending these incidents.
Looking at the four missing active shooter incidents, two committed suicide before police arrived, one was subdued by bystanders, and one was killed by police. That’s 75% of the missing attacks ending without police stopping the shooter.
When political appointees at the FBI get to manipulate the data, we end up with biased reports that can serve specific political purposes. This isn’t new or unique to this administration, check out my prior articles about the FBI’s 2023 and 2024 reports:
2024: FBI’s ‘gold standard’ active shooter report leaves out some school shootings
2023: Seven ‘active shooters’ at schools the FBI forgot to include in their 2023 report
2023: What’s really in the FBI report about ‘active shooters’ in 2023?
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database 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.