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.
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.