This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.
Earlier this month, a 7-year-old boy accidentally shot himself with a firearm he brought to his second grade classroom in Maryland.
During a single week last month, three separate K-12 students at different New York City schools were caught with a firearm on campus.
Over the past decade, fear of school shootings has grown among American teachers, parents, and students. Nearly 75% of U.S. teenagers worry about school gun violence, according to a national survey administered by public health researchers at Indiana University.
Despite mounting anxiety about school shootings, the task of tracking the number of guns in U.S. public schools is about to get even harder. Shortly after returning to office last year, President Donald Trump’s administration gutted the Department of Education office responsible for collecting and analyzing most school-related data. The National Center for Education Statistics was reduced to just five employees as of March 2025. Those cuts now jeopardize the future of already shaky statistics about the number of K-12 students caught with firearms on campus.
In lieu of accurate, timely federal data, The Trace used past NCES reports, Gun Violence Archive data, and public health research to try to understand how guns end up in American schools. We learned that students are more likely to bring guns to school when they are exposed to violence and have easy access to firearms. We also found fewer U.S. public schools had armed law enforcement officers during the 2021–22 school year compared to previous years, signaling a possible shift away from armed guards as a school safety measure. Mostly, we learned that public health researchers cannot effectively study school safety without robust federal data on guns in schools.
Fear often drives students to bring guns to school
Despite the lack of quality information, available data and research offer clues about why some students bring guns to school, and why school officials have struggled to respond.
For many students, carrying a gun is seen as a necessary form of self-defense in a violent world. A 2022 study of high schoolers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that youth who are exposed to violence are more likely to carry a gun.
“If kids are exposed to forms of violence in their neighborhoods or homes, they become more fearful,” said Joshua Rosenbaum, a criminal justice researcher at the University of Mississippi. “Fearful individuals, including kids, often feel like they need to protect themselves by keeping a firearm on them.”
The NCES data shows the nationwide rate of children bringing firearms to school spiked during the 2021-22 school year, the most recent year for which data is available. During that time, the U.S. gun violence epidemic hit a crescendo: Gun deaths reached near-record highs as communities across the country struggled to address gun homicides and suicides amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Trace analysis of Gun Violence Archive data found that the rate of kids caught with firearms in school returned to pre-pandemic levels as overall U.S. gun violence decreased in 2024 and 2025.
Rosenbaum also told The Trace that children who have easy access to a firearm at home are significantly more likely to carry “a gun to school compared to their classmates who did not have guns available to them.”
In 2019, the U.S. Secret Service published an analysis of 41 school violence incidents that took place between 2008 and 2017. The agency found that most of the young “attackers” used a gun that was accessible to “from the home of their parents or another close relative.”
NCES data suggests that school officials’ strategy for dealing with campus gun violence may have evolved in recent years. After the Columbine High School shooting in 1990, the Department of Justice established a grant program to expand the hiring and training of “school resource officers” — law enforcement officials stationed on public school campuses. For decades, the presence of these armed officers was viewed as a possible deterrent for school shooters.
But armed school security may not be as popular as it was in the past. During the 2021-22 school year, just one quarter of U.S. public schools were staffed with a law enforcement officer that routinely carried a firearm on school grounds, down 26% from the previous school year. This shift in school officials’ approach to gun safety coincided with a growing body of public health research finding limited evidence that armed guards can prevent school gun violence.
It’s important to remember the limitations of NCES reporting. The agency’s data on armed school personnel relies on the School Survey on Crime and Safety. Participation in the survey is voluntary, meaning the results likely depict an incomplete picture of public schools’ use of armed guards. And in more recent years, some school districts have brought back armed officers after violent incidents.
Researchers trying to patch a fragmented data landscape
Research on guns in schools relies heavily on the National Center for Education Statistics, the data wing of the Department of Education. Under the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, schools must submit statistics about firearms on campus to their state education officials, who then share that information with the NCES.
The data collection system is deeply flawed. A 2018 Stateline investigation found that school and state officials routinely failed to track deadly school shootings in Arizona and Colorado. Journalists from Stateline, part of the national nonprofit news outlet States Newsroom, found that state education officials who collect firearm statistics from districts “don’t enforce the reporting requirements,” leading to undercounting.
NCES data also suffers from significant time lags, a common problem with federal datasets. The agency’s latest report was published in 2024, but even then the most recent school year included was 2021-22.
The data landscape worsened in 2025, when the Trump administration fired most of the NCES staff, part of a broader dismantling of the Department of Education.
Data from Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence incidents using open source research, offers a potential solution. The GVA tracker includes flags for incidents at schools, but unless the event is logged by local media or law enforcement — the organization’s primary sources — it likely won’t be included. Rural areas are especially susceptible to this undercounting.
Because of these limitations, researchers have turned elsewhere. Public health scholars like the University of Michigan’s Rebeccah Sokol have been forced to build their own data tools to track the incidence of guns in K-12 schools. In 2017, Sokol and her colleagues established the FACTS National Survey, a nationally representative study that asks teenagers directly about firearm access, carrying, and exposure to violence.
The approach has built-in drawbacks: It relies on teens’ self-reported behavior and is conducted in onetime survey waves, meaning it can miss rapid changes and cannot provide real-time, local detail. Still, tools like the FACTS survey offer a stopgap in a research landscape where the federal government has largely failed to systematically track how and why guns end up in the hands of children.
“If we received timely, accurate data on where and when students are bringing firearms to school,” Sokol told The Trace, “we could use that data to develop better strategies to prevent dangerous situations from happening.”
