School Climate & Safety Interactive

School Shootings in 2022: How Many and Where

Education Week’s 2022 School Shooting Tracker
January 05, 2022 | Updated: January 27, 2023 3 min read
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Looking for the Latest Data?

We are continuing to track school shootings. Click below to visit our latest tracker or explore year-by-year data on school shootings since 2018 that resulted in injuries or deaths.

Visit Our 2023 Tracker Explore Data Since 2018

School shootings—terrifying to students, educators, parents, and communities—always reignite polarizing debates about gun rights and school safety. To bring context to these debates, Education Week journalists began tracking shootings on K-12 school property that resulted in firearm-related injuries or deaths.

In 2022, we continued this heartbreaking, but important work. More information about this tracker and our methodology is below.

There were 51 school shootings in 2022 that resulted in injuries or deaths, the most in a single year since Education Week began tracking such incidents in 2018. Prior to 2022, the highest number of school shootings with injuries or deaths was last year when there were 35. There were 10 in 2020, and 24 each in 2019 and 2018. See School Shootings Over Time: Incidents, Injuries, and Deaths for historical data.

See Also

Image of street signs: (1) Stop sign, and (2) Gun Free School Zone.
Education Week and sshepard/iStock/Getty

Injuries & Deaths

51     School shootings with injuries or deaths

140     People killed or injured in a school shooting

40     People killed

32     Students or other children killed

8     School employees or other adults killed

100     People injured

Where the Shootings Happened

The size of the dots correlates to the number of people killed or injured. Click on each dot for more information.

About the Shootings

Click on the column names to sort the data.

A previous version of this table included the age, sex, and status of the suspect(s). We are no longer tracking that information.

Contact Information

For media or research inquiries about this data, contact library@educationweek.org.

About This Tracker

In the emotionally charged aftermath of school shootings, politicians, activists, news media, and ordinary citizens often cite statistics that can present a distorted view of how many of these incidents occur. Those statistics are used to fuel ongoing debates about gun control, arming teachers, and school security.

With this tracker, Education Week aims to provide a clear accounting of K-12 school shootings. There is no single right way of calculating numbers like this, and the human toll in the immediate aftermath and long term is impossible to measure. We hope to provide reliable information to help inform discussions, debates, and solutions.

Methodology

Counting Incidents

This page refers to incidents that meet all the following criteria:

  • where a firearm was discharged,
  • where any individual, other than the suspect or perpetrator, has a bullet wound resulting from the incident,
  • that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus, and
  • that occur while school is in session or during a school-sponsored event.

We do not track incidents in which the only shots fired were from an individual authorized to carry a gun on school property, such as a school resource officer, and who did so in their official capacity.

The numbers of incidents, injuries, and deaths reported in this tracker do not include suicides or self-inflicted injuries. While suicides and attempted suicides are serious issues of health and safety, many of the critical questions and debates that those incidents raise for educators and the broader public are often distinct from those generated by school shootings. Incidents may be added out of sequence as it can take time for verification.

Counting Injuries & Deaths

Injuries included in this tracker may be major or minor. While we only track incidents resulting in at least one bullet wound, total injuries are not necessarily the result of gunfire.

The total number of people killed or injured does not include the suspect or perpetrator.

Sources

In addition to our own reporting, we rely on local news outlets, school and district websites, news alerts via online search engines, the Gun Violence Archive, David Riedman’s K-12 School Shooting Database, and the Center for Homeland Defense and Security’s Naval Postgraduate School’s K-12 School Shooting database.

How to Cite This Page

School Shootings This Year: How Many and Where (2022, January 5). Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year-how-many-and-where/2022/01

See Also

Sign indicating school zone.
iStock/Getty

This page was updated on Oct. 31, 2022, with an expanded number of school shootings that resulted in injuries or deaths in 2021 and the total number of incidents since 2018.

Reporting & Analysis: Lesli Maxwell, Holly Peele, Stacey Decker, Hyon-Young Kim

Design & Visualization: Stacey Decker, Hyon-Young Kim

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