School Shooting Incidents and Perpetrator Characteristics, United States 1990-2016

1990-2016 coverage of publicly known K-12 school shootings resulting in injury in the United States. The database was created by the Department of Justice to analyze incident types and perpetrator characteristics, using quantitative and qualitative methods to inform policy.

Use Cases

• Analyze incident-level characteristics to differentiate between types of school shootings for targeted policy development.
• Study perpetrator-level characteristics to identify patterns and potential intervention points.
• Compare fatal shooting incidents to non-fatal injury events to understand factors influencing harm severity.

Strengths

• National scope covering all publicly known injury-causing K-12 school shootings over a 27-year period.
• Created by the Department of Justice with an evidence-based, open-source methodology.
• Designed to support both quantitative multivariate analysis and qualitative case studies.

Limitations

• Limited to publicly known incidents, potentially missing unreported or misclassified events.
• Data ends in 2016, lacking recent trends and patterns.
• Specific column details, row counts, and sample data are unavailable for assessment.

Provenance

Source

Department of Justice

Collection Method

Open-source compilation of publicly known incidents, analyzed with quantitative multivariate and qualitative case study methods.

Time Range

1990-2016

Freshness

Last updated metadata indicates 2025, but the underlying data covers 1990-2016.

Geography

United States (K-12 school grounds)