See the details below for who, how and what is contained in the database.
"In August 2018, NPR Morning Edition asked the question, “How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school? We should know, but we don’t.” The story highlighted a lack of accurate and consolidated statistical data on school shootings.
To address this data void, the K-12 School Shooting Database (www.chds.us/ssdb) has been created as a research product of the CHDS Advanced Thinking (HSx) program by David Riedman (CA-1402, HSx) and Desmond O’Neill (CA-1506, HSx). Although a number of other school shootings lists currently exist, they have different criteria, making their collective utility for global analysis severely limited.
The K-12 School Shoot Database contains more than 1,300 incidents from 1970 to present in which a gun is/was brandished, fired, or a bullet hit(s) school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims (including zero), time, day of the week, or reason. This definition, which is purposely more inclusive than exclusive, enables users to filter between subsets within the data (e.g., cause, number of victims, pre-planning, type of weapon(s) used, demographics, location) to conduct a more detailed analysis of incidents within their area of interest to make better informed decisions and generate more accurate reports.
The data was collected from 25 different sources including peer-reviewed studies, government reports, mainstream media, nonprofit entities, private websites, blogs, and crowdsourced lists. Prior to being included in the database, each incident has been filtered, cross-referenced and, when possible, validated against official records, such as police reports and court records. As new incidents occur or historical shootings are discovered they are added to the database using the same validation process.
Please submit questions, corrections, or information about other incidents to the research team (dariedma1@nps.edu and dsoneill@nps.edu). Feel free to share this link and the fact sheet with your colleagues that would be interested."
The information above was shared by Heather Issvoran.
