Since the horrific Columbine shooting in April 1999, there’ve been a tragic number of American public and religious school shootings. No matter how “experts” gloss over their statistics, if a single death is a tragedy, mass killings are light years beyond “tragedy.”
Having lost a son in high school – not from shooting, but from another life-altering catastrophe – I can only imagine the tidal wave of grief engulfing the family and friends of those lost children.
Much less reported, though nonetheless a tragedy, is that a disproportionate number of these shootings were perpetrated by those who identify as “transgender.”
Triggered by this latest shooting, I went looking for the real stats, trying to discover how much tragedy is really out there. I sought what most media shy away from.
As a trained journalist, I dug deep, recalling that:
If you want to know how many school shootings have occurred, just check the stats.
I’d learned this in J-School: Numbers never lie. Of course, my pre-Watergate profs assumed credible sources had credible numbers.
Right? Well, maybe. But don’t count on it.
While citing traditionally credible sources, the one that seems most honest in pointing out that nobody knows which stats to refer to as they judge the horrific impact of school shootings, Al Jazeera – a source I never thought I’d cite – said it clearly on August 28, 2025.
Depending on the database used, there were between 8 and 146 incidents of gun violence at schools across the US in 2025.
The apparently credible sources cited include the U.S. Census.
There are many sources that seem credible, but offer vastly differing statistics, sometimes in the same paragraph. They all can’t be true, so check your own “credible sources,” then decide who to trust. One apparently reliable source, Security.org, published the following number-based facts last April.
Since Columbine, there have been 118 school shootings, mostly in high schools. In 2024 alone, 332 incidents leading to 267 injuries and fatalities.
Clearly, there can’t be 118 "school shootings" from 1999-2024, but 332 "incidents" in 2024 alone.
Sit with that for a moment.
Security.org then maintained that, since 1999, 440 people have been killed and another 1,243 people – mostly kids – injured. That’s a total of 1,683 victims of school shootings over 26 years, for an average of 64 deaths and injuries per year. Horrific, to be sure, but nowhere near the number these disparate statistics – or presumably authoritative politicians – seem to proclaim.
If you further assume that parents and siblings are also collateral victims, this amount to 5,890 total victims. Horrific, but even counting the families, the number of victims run to around 227 per year.
Apparently, today’s journalists aren’t very good at math. Instead of hiring Ph.D.s, those sources should recruit champion “mathletes” before those kids get corrupted by college “educations.” This wide variance in statistics, often from the same source, suggests supposedly knowledgeable sources can’t agree on their own numbers, not even in a single article.
Citing research found in the K-12 School Shooting Database, published by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS), Security.org would get important stats like these right.
Right?
If anybody ought to know about the number of school shootings over the past 26 years, you’d think a source like CHDS would get it right.
Right?
Apparently not.
This article also quoted former President Joe Biden – an acknowledged expert in school shooting statistics. He was also highly regarded as sharp-as-a-tack. Biden, then well into his term as president, addressed school shootings in mid-2024 on the 25th anniversary of the Columbine shooting.
I won’t even ask why Joe celebrated Columbine’s quarter-century anniversary, except that he was running for president. Apparently, he wanted the votes of every red-blooded American who opposes school shootings. That’s why Joe won so handily against Donald Trump in 2024. Right?
Wait, maybe that was Trump who spoke decisively, won a second term in 2024, and is now rewriting the Presidential Playbook. In his first six months back in office, he’s successfully enacted eight years’ worth of decisive change. Biden spent four years enacting exactly nothing.
“In that speech,” Security.org asserted, President Biden said “more than 400 school shootings have taken place since Columbine, exposing more than 370,000 US students to gun violence.”
Three Hundred Seventy Thousand.
That’s a far cry from either the 118 shootings in that period, or 400 shootings – dependent on which source is being cited.
Let’s do the math and see. If there were indeed 400 school shootings between Columbine and its 25th anniversary, and more than 370,000 students were exposed to gun violence, that would average more than 925 students being injured or murdered per shooting event, a ridiculously high number.
Perhaps most egregious of all are the stats that the media hides from, statistics that seem hard to pin down – until Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro blew the whistle: Shooters suffering from Gender dysphoria and being treated with hormone-altering drugs. In the wake of the Minneapolis shooting, Shapiro reviewed last week – not comprehensibly, but decisively -- a number of those recent shootings:
Shapiro also cited other public attacks by individuals self-identifying with gender dysphoria, but not specifically attacking schools:
These attacks are relevant as last week’s shooting in Minneapolis, like Covenant in Nashville, was undertaken by a trans-identified man.
Another stat seldom explored by the media is the number of murderous shooters who attacked their former schools, leaving body bags of death and critical injuries in their wake. Sources are hard to find, but here are the facts.
On March 27, 2023, a transgender male named Aiden Hale – born Audrey Elizabeth Hale – a former student at The Covenant School, a Presbyterian Church in America parochial elementary school in Nashville. She attacked her former school with a pistol-caliber carbine, more powerful than a pistol with the same caliber.
This deeply disturbed individual – whom police said was desperate for publicity and martyrdom – murdered three nine-year-old students and three adults, before being brought down by Metro Nashville police, who said she’d targeted this school specifically because it was Christian, and very likely because she’d attended that school years earlier.
The 44-page final police report of this shooting is available online.
A remarkably similar shooting occurred just last week, on August 27, 2025, in Minneapolis. The school – the Annunciation Church and Catholic School – also resulted in multiple injuries and fatalities, including two children, age 8 and 10, who were killed, while 20 others – including 15 children and five adults, two in their 80s – sustained injuries.
The shooter, self-identified as Robin Westman but he was born Robert Westman, a young man who suicided himself, said he was still struggling with gender and left behind hundreds of pages of a rambling manifesto.
There is a striking parallel between the Nashville shooting and the one last week in Minneapolis:
Maybe it’s time for President Trump to federalize school shootings, ordering the FBI to keep and analyze reliable stats about school shootings, going back at least to Columbine. From this, we’ll be able to draw conclusions about these historical shootings.
In addition, it would prevent local police chiefs – like Nashville’s – to stonewall conclusions about shootings, especially done regarding trans-identified murderers.
Factors to study about school shootings – perhaps especially parochial school shootings – is to see how many of them are done by former students with gender dysphoria who have been treated with hormone-altering and other drugs.
With enough accurate information, perhaps the FBI, the local police, the schools and the public can draw some conclusions and begin protecting schools in advance.
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I’m Ned Barnett, a life-long writer and journalist who’s found a “home” at American Thinker. This relationship dates back to 2006, when – at the encouragement of Rush Limbaugh, perhaps AT’s most ardent fan – I first began reading AT, then contributing to AT.
My writing career began much earlier, my first book being published in 1982; My 41st book, published earlier this year, will be the first of at least three books I publish this year.
When I’m not writing my own work, ranging from SF/Fantasy to Historical Fiction, non-Fiction business books and a forthcoming “creative nonfiction” auto-bio, a satiric commentary on our society over the past 50 years, I help other writers and aspiring writers to “get the word out.”
Much of my writing time helps aspiring authors in several ways. First, by ghostwriting, co-writing and writing coaching them toward publication. Next, by self-publishing, marketing, promoting and bulk-copy selling their books.
If you’re a writer or want to be, and have questions, please contact me at nedbarnett51@gmail.com or call me at 702-561-1167.
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