Virginia

School Shooting Numbers Difficult to Define

The tragic shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon last week has reignited the gun control debate nationwide, and parents and policymakers alike have taken to citing an oft-used statistic that there have been 143 school shootings in the United States since the Sandy Hook massacre in late 2012.

That figure is provided by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun reform group established by former New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, after the events in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.

But do those numbers check out?

That depends how you define a school shooting, experts say.

“I think a common sense way to look at school shootings is any time a gun is discharged in a school building or on school grounds,” says Kath Tsakalakis, a volunteer with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a gun safety group that is part of Everytown.

That definition covers a lot of ground.

NBC Bay Area read through the Everytown list incident by incident.

Some cases detail the horrors of high school and college students opening fire in classrooms or cafeterias.

Others are incidental, like the case of an Idaho professor who accidentally shot himself in the foot during chemistry class. In total, NBC Bay Area identified nine cases of misfire on the list.

Around twenty-seven events—a conservative estimate—were unrelated to the school except for location.

For instance, earlier this year, two Florida men engaged in an altercation over crab traps. The fight made its way onto school properly, and one man shot the other in the hand. Many of these types of incidents took place after school hours.

Fifteen incidents were suicide or attempted suicide on campus.

Can all of these cases be classified as school shootings?

“The whole area of gun violence is such a complicated and multifaceted thing that the mass shootings are the most visible and most disruptive societally,” said John J. Donohue III, a public policy expert from Stanford University's law school. “But they’re a relatively small number when you think of the huge number of deaths that we have overall by gun or by other means.”

According to FBI data, there were 8,124 gun homicides in the United States last year.

The FBI has no formal definition for school shooting, but the agency did release a report last year that analyzed more than a decade of active shooter incidents, which is defined as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area” like a school, an office building or a mall.

According to that report, 160 active shooter incidents occurred in the U.S. between 2000 and 2013. Of those incidents, 39 occurred at schools.

The report lists four incidents that had the highest casualty counts. Two of those incidents were school shootings: 32 people killed at Virginia Tech in 2007, and 27 dead after the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

On average, 11.4 active shooter incidents occurred each year.

“I think the trend over time between 2000 and 2013 has been an increase per year,” said David J. Johnson, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's San Francisco Division. “I think overall it’s averaging a little less than one incident per month.”

Stanford’s Donohue recognizes the danger in citing numbers around this issue.

“Passions are so high on this issue that people grab the numbers that make their side look better, and sometimes they may not be aware of the full nuance of that number,” he said.

Johnson agrees. “I think you have to pause when it comes to the statistical data that is out there,” he said.

That doesn’t mean the Everytown numbers should be ignored, he added. “I think it’s a great starting point. If it calls attention to the issue that’s a good thing.”

While opposing sides continue to argue the scale of the problem, the nation and its president continue to grieve.

“Somehow this has become routine,” President Obama said in his speech following the Umpqua shooting last week. “I hope and pray that I don’t have to come out again during my tenure as president, to offer my condolences to families in these circumstances.”

The only number he and parents like Kath Tsakalakis care about now is zero. Moving forward, that’s how many massacres, deaths, or firearm discharges they want to see on school campuses.

“Parents in other countries are not sending their children to school with bulletproof backpacks that are sold in America," she said. “I think Newtown changed many things."

That’s why she’s made it her mission to advocate for gun reform.

“We can implement these better gun laws and get guns out of schools, out of criminal hands, and make these kinds of mass murder situations a lot less frequent,” she said.

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