Nearly ten years after the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, shool shootings in the United States have never faded out of the public discussion. Are incidents happening more frequently than before? Who are the people threatening school safety? And what happened to the shooters afterward?
We looked through the data of school shooting at K-12 schools collected by the School Shooting Safety Compendium from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS)and found four trends.
Overall, school shootings happen most frequently during the fall and spring semesters.
Shootings started to happen much more frequently at beginning the year of 2012, which also happens to be the year of the Sandy Hook incident. The incident numbers went up a lot more after 2016.
Even though the COVID-19 pandemic loomed over the whole country, the trend didn’t seem to be interupted. There were still 24 cases in September 2020, the beginning of the fall semester that year and the middle of the pandemic.
From there, cases kept increasing. In the following September, there was a historically high number of 55 school shootings taking place across the country. And according to the heatmap, the shooting case number does not seem to decrease.
Alarmingly, most of the shooters are students, who can easily enter campus. Shooters with unknown relations with the schools or no relation to the schools also take up a large proportion of the shooters.
There are also some shooters who were considered third-party violence, including the police, gang members, hitman, students from rival schools, non-student using atheletic facilities and people attending games at the school.
Family and friends of the students and staff at the school also consist of a part of the shooters.
So what happened to the shooters after the shooting happened?
The majority of the shooters fled, escaped or were apprehended after the shooting took place. There were also some shooters surrendered or committed suicide at the scene.
About 9.75% of shooters died at the scene.
For shooters who did not die in the shooting, the chances of charges being filed is about 32%.
Handgun seems to be the most popular choice of weapon in school shootings, followed by rifles and shotguns.
Also there are some of the weapons in the school shootings that still remain unknown to the public.