Are School Shootings Decreasing? Numbers, Drivers, and Outlook

School shootings in the United States are decreasing by most counts, at least over the past two years. The K-12 School Shooting Database recorded 352 incidents in 2023, its highest annual total on record, then 233 in 2025, the lowest count since 2020.¹ That is roughly a 34 percent drop in two years, and it tracks a broader decline in homicides, mass killings, and violent crime nationally. But researchers who study the data closely urge caution: definitions vary, two years is a short window, and the United States still records far more school shootings than any comparable country.

What the Recent Numbers Show

The 2025 total of 233 incidents was the lowest since the pandemic-disrupted year of 2020, which saw 116.¹ Mass killings in schools fell to near zero: none of the mass killings recorded in 2025 by the AP/USA Today/Northeastern University database occurred in a school, and only one did in 2024.² Education Week, using its narrower definition, logged 15 shootings in the first half of 2026 that killed or injured at least one person on K-12 grounds, with 10 deaths and 12 injuries.³

The decline is real, but it is not the same as safety. In August 2025, a former student fired through the stained-glass windows of Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis during morning Mass, killing two children and injuring 17 others.⁴

Why Different Sources Report Different Numbers

If you compare headlines, you will see wildly different totals for the same year. There is no uniform federal definition of a school shooting, so each tracker counts something slightly different.⁵

The K-12 School Shooting Database uses the broadest definition. It counts any incident in which a gun is fired, brandished at a person, or a bullet strikes school property, regardless of time of day, number of victims (including zero), or motive. Gang violence, accidental discharges, suicides, domestic disputes, and after-hours sporting event incidents all qualify.⁶ Education Week counts only incidents on K-12 grounds in which someone was killed or injured by gunfire, and excludes suicides and accidental discharges by law enforcement.⁷ The Washington Post’s database narrows further, counting only shootings during or immediately before and after school hours.⁸ Everytown for Gun Safety counts any time a gun discharges a live round inside or onto a school building or campus, from preschools through universities.⁹

The practical effect is large. The broadest tracker can report hundreds of incidents while a narrower one reports dozens for the same period. Federal data adds another layer: the National Center for Education Statistics found “no consistent trend” in school-associated violent deaths from 2000 through 2021, with annual totals fluctuating between 25 and 63.¹⁰ None of these approaches is wrong. They answer different questions, and any claim about a trend depends on which one is being used.

What Appears to Be Driving the Drop

A Broader Decline in Violence

School shootings are falling inside a much larger decline. The United States is on track for what may be the largest one-year drop in homicides ever recorded, with roughly a 20 percent decrease in 2025 following declines of 15 percent in 2024, 13 percent in 2023, and 6 percent in 2022. If confirmed, the 2025 homicide rate would be the lowest since at least 1960, when the FBI began keeping records.¹¹ The Gun Violence Archive projected a 22 percent drop in mass shooting incidents in 2025 compared to 2024, and mass killings fell to 17, the lowest number since 2006.²

James Densley, a criminologist at Metropolitan State University and co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project, described the pattern as “the fever breaking” after pandemic-era spikes.¹² Researchers at the Council on Criminal Justice attribute the broader decline to the normalization of social routines after the pandemic, federal stabilization funding through the American Rescue Plan Act, and investments in community violence intervention and evidence-based policing.¹³

Threat Assessment in Schools

Behavioral threat assessment programs try to identify students or others who may pose a risk of violence before anything happens. Multidisciplinary teams evaluate warning signs and connect individuals with support services rather than defaulting to punishment. At least 11 states now mandate that schools establish threat assessment teams, including Florida, Texas, Virginia, and Illinois.¹⁴ Eric Madfis, a criminologist at the University of Washington-Tacoma, noted that 22 states have mandated school threat assessments in recent years and suggested this expansion may be contributing to the decline.²

Evidence is promising but limited. A National Institute of Justice-sponsored study of Virginia’s K-12 public schools found that 97 percent of assessed threats were resolved without the student attempting to carry out the threatened action.¹⁵ A 2025 U.S. Secret Service report found that 90 percent of surveyed principals believed their threat assessment programs were effective, though the report acknowledged that variability in models makes national-level effectiveness hard to measure.¹⁶ The Learning Policy Institute has cautioned that poorly implemented programs can lead to over-criminalization of vulnerable students, particularly Black students and students with disabilities.¹⁷

Red Flag Laws

Extreme Risk Protection Orders let courts temporarily remove firearms from individuals deemed a danger to themselves or others. As of early 2025, 21 states and the District of Columbia had enacted such laws, with Maine becoming the most recent in 2026.¹⁸ A multistate study found that 10 percent of all ERPO petitions involved threats against three or more people, with K-12 schools being the most common targets. A review of 21 California cases where gun violence restraining orders were issued to prevent mass shootings found that none resulted in subsequent violence.¹⁹ RAND Corporation’s broader analysis concluded that the evidence for how red flag laws affect mass shootings remains “inconclusive,” in part because existing studies typically examine only one or two states over short periods.²⁰

Federal Legislation and Funding

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, signed on June 25, 2022, was the most significant federal gun safety legislation in nearly three decades. It authorized $1.3 billion for school safety (including $1 billion in “Stronger Connections” grants to high-need districts), $750 million for state crisis intervention programs including red flag law implementation, $250 million for community violence interventions, and over $1.8 billion for mental health services.²¹ By June 2024, more than 3,500 schools had expanded intervention teams, 2,300 had formed new ones, and enhanced background checks for buyers under 21 had stopped 800 firearm sales to prohibited individuals.²²

Why Researchers Say the Decline May Not Last

Mass shootings and mass killings are statistically rare, so small fluctuations in annual counts can look like dramatic swings. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, has cautioned that “what goes down must also go back up,” describing the 2025 figures as potentially a return to more typical levels rather than a new trajectory.² Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, has noted that crime patterns typically require decade-long analysis to interpret meaningfully.¹

The Council on Criminal Justice has flagged other uncertainties: the depletion of federal pandemic-era stimulus funding, potential shifts in federal policy priorities, and the possibility that violence may be emerging in non-urban areas even as it decreases in cities.¹³ And the baseline remains unlike anywhere else. A broader study of 36 developed countries found that between 2000 and 2022, the United States accounted for 33 percent of those countries’ combined population but 76 percent of their public mass shooting incidents and 70 percent of victim fatalities.²³ Madfis put it plainly: even with the drop, the United States continues to experience “exceedingly high rates and numbers of mass shootings compared to anywhere else in the world.”²

1
K-12 Dive. School Shootings 2025: What to Know in 2026
2
PBS NewsHour. U.S. Mass Killings Are Down in 2025; Experts Say Its Likely a Return to Typical Levels
3
Education Week. School Shootings This Year: How Many and Where
4
CNN. Religious Schools Annunciation Shootings Minneapolis
5
U.S. Government Accountability Office. K-12 Education: Characteristics of School Shootings
6
K-12 School Shooting Database. Methodology
7
Education Week. School Shootings Over Time: Incidents, Injuries, and Deaths
8
KFF. Examining School Shootings at the National and State Level
9
Everytown Research. How Can We Prevent Gun Violence in Schools
10
National Center for Education Statistics. Violent Deaths and Shootings
11
ABC News. U.S. Poised to End 2025 With Largest Year Drop in Homicides
12
WBAL-TV. Mass Shootings 2025
13
Council on Criminal Justice. Whats Driving the Drop in Homicide? How Low Might It Go?
14
Everytown Research. School Threat Assessment Teams
15
National Institute of Justice. Student Threat Assessment: A Virginia Study
16
U.S. Secret Service. The State of Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management in K-12 Public Schools
17
Learning Policy Institute. Behavioral Threat Assessments Brief
18
Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Red Flag Laws or ERPOs
19
Everytown Research. Extreme Risk Laws Save Lives
20
RAND Corporation. Extreme Risk Protection Orders
21
Biden White House Archives. A Report on the Implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act
22
U.S. Department of Justice. Fact Sheet: Two Years of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act
23
Rockefeller Institute of Government. Public Mass Shootings Around the World: Prevalence, Context, and Prevention