K-12 School Shooting Database: Research Methodology - Criteria Used in Creating a Centralized Compendium of School Shootings, Establishing Definitions for Comprehensive Review of Violence Issue

This report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. "How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school? We should know, but we don't." These two sentences, taken from a widely-publicized August 2018 NPR investigative report, underscore a significant problem: when it comes to school shootings within the United States, there is a dire lack of accurate and consolidated statistical data.

The current landscape of publicly available information compiled on school shootings comes from a wealth of sources including, but not limited to, peer-reviewed studies, government reports, archived newspapers, mainstream media, non-profit enquiries, private websites, personal blogs, and crowd-sourced lists. Individually, however, these platforms fail to capture the magnitude of the problem. For example, government reports on school shootings by the US Secret Service, FBI, and Department of Education provide an explanation of factors contributing to shootings, but do not catalogue a comprehensive list of the incidents. Lists of shootings reported by the media identify a large number of incidents, but provide few details beyond the date and location. Databases of school shootings on blogs and crowd-sourced websites have extensive lists of school shootings, but lack citations to any primary source. Without a common methodology for data collection, individual data sources are limited in both validity and utility. Furthermore, there is no consensus for what actually defines a school shooting to serve as the inclusion/exclusion criteria across the different datasets.

Based on the differences among all available reporting platforms, there is currently no single source for objective and accessible data from which school administrators, law enforcement, and public officials can draw to inform their decisions. As a result, there is a need for a widely inclusive K-12 school shooting database that documents each and every instance in which a gun is brandished, fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims (including zero), time, day of the week, or reason (e.g., planned attack, accidental, domestic violence, gang-related). The breadth of this dataset would allow for a comprehensive view of the issue while providing users with the ability to filter between specific subsets within the data (e.g., number of victims, pre-planning, and type of weapon used). Through the inclusion, rather than exclusion, of criteria that are cross-referenced, unfiltered, and agnostic, users could conduct a more detailed analyses of specific incidents within their area(s) of interest from which to make better informed decisions and generate more accurate reports.

1. Introduction * 2. Defining School Shootings * 3. Step 1: Database Compilation and Preliminary Research * 4. Step 2: Detailed Research * 5. Step 3: Reliability Score and Validation of Research with Official Documents * 6. Step 4: Validation with Official Sources