"A significant evolution in school shootings began the ’60s, the occurrence of a few large-scale, horrific attacks. These are the notable, but rare, exceptions to the general single-victim shootings:
1966: at the University of Texas, a student killed 15 students and injured 31 others.
1999: at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., two students killed 12 students and a teacher, and injured 21 others.
2005: on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota, a student killed his grandfather and companion at their home and drove to the Red Lake Senior High School where he killed five students, a teacher, and a security guard, and wounded seven others.
2007: at Virginia Tech, a student killed 32 students and faculty members, and injured another 17 students and faculty members.
2012: at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a shooter killed 20 first-graders, four teachers, the principal, and the school psychologist, and injured two others.
2015: at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., a gunman killed eight students and a teacher, and injured nine others.
2018: at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a 19-year-old former student, killed 17 people and injured 17 others.
2018: at the Santa Fe High School in Texas, a shooter killed 10 people and injured 12 others.
Those eight incidents represent only 2 percent of the 415 school shootings that occurred between 1960 and the present. However, those eight incidents resulted in 141 deaths (27 percent of the total deaths) and 123 injuries (14 percent of the total injuries).
The comparison between the United States and other countries is illustrative. However, strictly speaking, the data aren’t directly comparable because of variations in geographies, timescales, and populations.
Roger Warburton, Ph.D., is a Newport, R.I., resident"