DENVER (KDVR) — If it feels like there are more alerts for shootings at schools, real or fake, in Colorado, it’s because there are.
Wednesday, police arrested one student in connection to a shooting in Brighton in which three were injured. Several schools had closed as a security precaution. This comes only weeks after a series of so-called “swatting calls” sent a wave of closures and police presence across Colorado schools over bogus claims of active shooters.
The bogus calls exploit credible fears illustrated by the Brighton incident. Last year was a record for the number of school shootings. This is according to data sets from the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security and the K-12 School Shooting Database.
There were 303 incidents last year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database which tracks every discharged firearm on school property for any reason. That is 10 times the number that occurred in 2013.
Since 1970, the number of incidents had not surpassed 100 until 2018. In 2021, that had grown to 250.
It is similar in Colorado where numbers have risen sharply in the latter half of the 2010s, according to state-specific data from CHDS which tracks each and every instance a gun is brandished, fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of the week.
Most years between 1970 and 2000 had no school shootings. After Columbine, there were one or two every year or every other year. There were three in 2016, five in 2019 and five in 2021, which is the last year with complete Colorado-specific data in the CDHS database.
Though it has been the location of several high-profile mass shooting incidents, Colorado does not have a disproportionate number of school shootings.
There have been 29 school shootings in Colorado between January 1970 and June 2022, putting Colorado 21st in the U.S. California, Texas, Florida and Illinois have the most, while Wyoming, New Jersey, Hawaii and Virginia have the least.
Indiscriminate shootings represent 4.6% of all school shootings. Half are escalations of a dispute, accidents, drive-by shootings, suicides or related to illegal activity.