History Notes Special: School Shootings in America

The earliest known United States shooting to happen on school property was the Pontiac’s Rebellion school massacre on July 26, 1764, where four Lenape American Indians entered the schoolhouse near present-day Greencastle, Pennsylvania, shot and killed schoolmaster Enoch Brown, and killed nine or ten children (reports vary). Only two children survived.

Kids brought guns to school until the 70s. There were only 3 school mass shootings between 1903-1966. What happened?

Almost every school shooting from 1800 to 1960 was targeted at one person. (One guy shot his teacher in 1866 for bullying his brother and got acquitted). School shootings simply didn’t happen with any frequency until 1993.

Something went wrong for kids born post-1975. And it got significantly worse for kids born 1996-2001. In The early 1900ds, it was explosions and bombs, but there were no mass shootings.

There was only 1 school shooting in the 1800ds. (1898 Charleston. 6 died. 0 until 1940 when a high school principal shot 5 of his colleagues(5 died) in 1966 at the University of Texas , Rose Mar college. (18,5).

No school shootings happened until 1984.

A school shooting is defined as 3 or more dead. There were many instances of 1 or 2 people being shot 1800-1970 (revenge, not mostly random). Even that was fairly rare. There was an elementary school shooting (5 kids) in the 70s, however, no one died.

See the full dataset here.

Note: Active shooter incidents per year: 2017: 31 2018: 30 2019: 30 2020: 40 2021: 61 Source: FBI: https://fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-incidents-in-the-us-2021-052422.pdf/