This document provides brief summaries of the shooters’ negative experiences in educational settings, including academic failures, disciplinary actions, and other issues. It also notes their families’ involvement in education, primarily as school personnel such as teachers or professors. Finally, it identifies those cases in which the shooters targeted specific people at school due to perceived injustices, as well as those shooters whose violence may have been related to their family members’ positions or accomplishments in education.
This document lists nicknames, usernames, quotations, and other items that may be used by potential attackers to refer to previous killers or incidents of violence. Knowing these references is important to anyone conducting threat assessments. For examples of cases in which shooters used such insider references prior to their attacks, see the companion document “Reading Between the Lines: Recognizing Insider References to School Shootings.”
One way to make sense of school shootings is to examine who the targets were. Though some attacks consisted of indiscriminate violence against anyone in the vicinity, others were partly or completely targeted against specific people. This document lists shooters and notes their targeted victims in five categories: bullies, rivals, family members, girls/women, and school personnel.
This document lists arrests, law enforcement contacts, and reports to the police about the perpetrators of school shootings that occurred prior to their attacks.
This document identifies the sources of firearms used in 52 school shootings (involving 54 perpetrators) during the twenty-five years from 1991 through 2015. The sample includes both single-victim and multi-victim shootings committed by secondary school, college, and aberrant adult perpetrators.
This document presents data in several areas: body-related issues that may have been challenges to the perpetrators’ identities, family members who served in the military and/or law enforcement, the shooters’ aspirations to serve in these professions, and the frequent thwarting of these aspirations. These different sets of data are presented together to explore possible connections between the shooters’ family role models for masculinity, their own possible sense of damaged manhood, and their own striving to be soldiers or police officers. Note: though the focus is on masculine identity, the document also includes female shooters with body-related issues, family members in the military, and military aspirations.
This is an exploration of the issue of influence among school shooters, documenting references by subsequent attackers to those who came before them. It also notes historical figures who may have served as role models for violence. The bulk of the document is a listing of school shooters and their influences, including a diagram of the lines of influence from Columbine through subsequent attacks. For an analysis of the multiple types of influence among school shooters, see the document “Different Types of Role Model Influence and Fame Seeking Among Mass Killers and Copycat Offenders.” For a graphic representation of the influence of Columbine on subsequent attacks, see “The Influence of Columbine” (poster and tabloid format).
This document pulls together information on a variety of issues relating to school shooters, including adoption, immigration, fire-setting, marriage, self-injurious behavior, hostage situations, attempts to escape, Nazi interest, satanism, suicide by cop, those who killed family members, and those who have been released from prison. It also covers multiple aspects of sexuality.
A common misconception about school shooters is that they are typically kids from stable, middle-class families. This document presents information on the families of shooters, including factors such as divorce, domestic violence, child abuse, criminal behavior, and parental alcoholism and drug addiction. The percentage of broken homes and dysfunctional familes is very high.
This document answers frequently asked questions about school shootings, with links to other resources that provide more comprehensive information.
This is the complete spreadsheet that lists all attributes of all shooters profiled on this site. This document is continually updated to reflect new information, and the data should be identical to those in the School Shooters .info database. Latest revision: 19 July, 2024. Note: This is an Excel file. It will download to your computer, not open in your browser. Once it’s downloaded, you can manipulate the rows and columns as with any spreadsheet. Thus, you can rank or organize the shooters by date of attack, age, psychological type, number of victims, or any other variable included in the data.
This document summarizes the medication and substance abuse histories of dozens of school shooters. This is a companion document to the article “Psychiatric Medications and School Shootings.”
This is a timeline of all the school shootings and other attacks included on this site.
This diagram portrays the apparent lines of influence from Columbine through subsequent attacks. All of the post-Columbine perpetrators included here either explicitly cited Columbine as an influence or made oral or written references that suggest it influenced their own attacks. The lines of influence illustrate links between those who were influenced by Columbine and later perpetrators whom they influenced in turn. The New York Times described an earlier version of this document: “Langman has created a mass-shooter diagram tracking the influence Columbine has had on more than 30 other rampage attacks at schools and elsewhere, from California to Germany. The diagram resembles a corporate flowchart, with lines branching out and intersecting, but all of them flowing out of two names: the Columbine killers.” This document may be downloaded as a large-scale poster or in smaller tabloid format. This is a companion document to “Role Models, Contagions, and Copycats: An Exploration of the Influence of Prior Killers on Subsequent Attacks.”
This large-format poster shows all attacks influenced by Columbine, arranged in a timeline format, with attack details and lines of influence.
This 11-by-17-inch version of the diagram features a compact representation of the lines of influence between perpetrators.