Guns are seized in U.S. schools each day; numbers are soaring
Jaden Wood didn’t know about the gun brought to school on the fourth day of his junior year until he got home and the news spread on social media. An assistant principal at Rome High in northwest Georgia had gotten a tip and confronted a ninth-grader, police would later say. But the 15-year-old refused to give up his backpack, prompting a resource officer to wrestle him to the floor. Inside the bag, a staff member found a black 9mm handgun loaded with seven rounds, including one in the chamber.
Jaden, then 16, felt more annoyed than frightened. He was, at last, an upperclassman, with his own parking spot and aspirations for the year ahead: AP classes, starting on the soccer team and, maybe, finding a girlfriend. The gun was an aberration.
“It’s not going to happen again,” he remembered thinking on that Wednesday evening in early August 2022.
And then it did — on the fifth day of school.
A 16-year-old was spotted on a security camera with a Glock sticking out of his jacket pocket, police said. It, too, was loaded. Rome High, Jaden understood, would not soon get past this, and neither would he.
“School a war zone …” the teen wrote on Instagram.
In the United States, where gun violence has soared since the pandemic began, Jaden’s experience is one shared by students of every age in every state throughout the school year — a bleak reflection of a society awash in firearms.
Last school year, news reports identified more than 1,150 guns brought to K-12 campuses but seized before anyone fired them, according to an investigation by The Washington Post.
That’s more than six guns each day, on average. Nationwide, 1 in 47 school-age children — 1.1 million students — attended a school where at least one gun was found and reported on by the media in the 2022-2023 school year.
But the true number is almost certainly far higher. A Washington Post survey of 51 of the country’s largest school systems showed that 58 percent of seizures in those districts last academic year were never publicly reported by news organizations. Those same districts said the number of guns recovered on campus rose sharply in recent years, mirroring the growing prevalence of firearms in many other public places.
The guns were discovered practically everywhere — bookbags, lockers, trash cans, bathrooms, cars, pockets, purses, bulging behind waistbands and hidden above bathroom ceiling tiles. Some were brought by accident, others to show off. In many cases, police alleged, they were brought to end lives.
A Florida 16-year-old was caught after taking selfies with a pink-handled pistol in a high school restroom. In Georgia, a teacher found a handgun inside a diaper bag, and in Illinois, a 10-year-old girl smuggled in a gun that belonged to her mother, a corrections officer.
At an Ohio high school, a mass shooting plot was foiled, police said, after a student found a lone bullet in a restroom and reported it. In New Mexico, a 26-year-old posing as a Sheriff’s deputy confidently strolled the halls of his former high school with a pistol on his hip; and in Indiana, a man brought a gun to campus because he wanted to prove that schools were not safe. At a Michigan high school graduation, after a fight broke out in the parking lot, police found a .40-caliber gun modified to fire like a machine gun hidden inside a 19-year-old’s pant leg. Each case resulted in criminal charges.
School resource officers often play an essential role in learning who has a gun and seizing it, according to cases reviewed by The Post and interviews with experts. While often seen as a controversial presence on campus, such officers can be crucial in gaining the trust of students and staff, school-safety experts say, and in taking swift action to stop school shootings before they happen.
Anonymous tip apps and systems can also be instrumental; one system that debuted in 2018 has averted at least 15 planned school shootings since then, according to the organization that runs the system. But clear backpacks and metal detectors at school entrances, while reassuring to parents, do little to stop students from slipping guns through side and rear doors. Overall, experts say, expensive weapons-detection technology is no substitute for a school community where children trust adults enough to tell them when something appears to be wrong.
Some schools and districts openly communicate with parents and staff about weapons seized on campus, creating a dialogue that can teach more parents to lock up their guns at home and lead to more anonymous tips. Many other schools and districts, however, hoping to avoid public scrutiny or raise alarm, have tried to limit who gets information when guns are seized.
In Prattville, Ala., a mother learned from her son that he had a gun pointed at his face at school, while the principal told parents no students were in imminent danger during the incident. Police in Golden Valley, Minn., complained in March that middle school officials waited five days to notify them of two boys who appeared to be posing for social media pictures while holding a gun in the school bathroom; a spokesperson for the Robbinsdale Area Public Schools district said officials have worked since then to improve the school-police partnership.
In each case, the guns inspired uncertainty, anger and fear.
At Rome High, administrators declined to be interviewed but shared a list of security improvements made since the two incidents.
Jaden said dozens of the school’s 2,000 students were too afraid to go back to campus after the second weapon was found. Two teenagers he knew switched to virtual learning for the rest of the semester.
His best friend, Markevis Watkins, lives in a neighborhood afflicted with gun violence. He’s heard shots at night and lost a cousin in a shooting a few years earlier. School had always felt like a refuge. Now, in just 24 hours, that sense of security had been stripped away.
“I could actually get, like, shot,” Markevis said, remembering how his thinking changed. “I’ve got to be wary of who to be around at school — and whether they’ve got a gun or not.”
A NATIONWIDE EPIDEMIC
Even an exhaustive review of local news sources cannot account for guns carried into schools undetected, gun seizures never disclosed by districts and guns found on campuses located in communities underserved by news organizations. Still, The Post’s survey recorded guns recovered at schools in rural, suburban and urban areas, in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
And those reports tell just part of the story.
To get a fuller picture, The Post asked the country’s 100 largest school districts to share data on guns seized over the last five school years. While many districts said they do not track the number of guns found on their campuses, disclosures from 51 of them illuminated the gap between what’s reported in the news and what happens in schools.
In those districts, representing 6.3 million students, 515 guns were found during the 2022-2023 school year. Only 42 percent of those incidents received any media attention, and the rate of news coverage varied widely between cities. In Dekalb County, Ga., for example, just two of the 24 guns found on campuses were reported on, while in Louisville, nearly every gun seizure — 24 out of 26 — led to a news story.
Some local news outlets are stretched too thin to learn about gun seizures in schools, especially if administrators aim to keep incidents quiet, experts said. Other communities experience so much violence that the confiscation of an unfired weapon from a school building filled with children doesn’t rate as news.
“In many ways, these scares at schools are no longer newsworthy,” said Nick Mathews, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri who studies American media deserts. “And that’s rather terrifying.”
The Post found that the number of campus gun seizures spiked significantly between the 2018-2019 school year and the 2022-2023 school year — a five-year period that, following the pandemic shutdowns, also has seen significantly more behavioral problems in school. The 47 districts for which The Post was able to obtain five full school years of data saw a 79 percent increase in guns found on campuses over that time frame. In many communities, the number of guns found has more than doubled, a trend that mirrors a precipitous rise in school shootings.
In the last full school year before the pandemic, the Arlington Independent School District in Texas found one gun on its campuses. Last school year, that number ballooned to 19. In the Gwinnett County School District in Georgia, the number of guns found jumped from four to 17 over the same period. And in Omaha Public Schools, the tally went from 1 in the 20182019 school year to 11 last school year.
Federal law prohibits guns on K-12 campuses, with exceptions for licensed carriers.