SCHOOL SHOOTINGSMichigan State Murders: What We Know About Campus Shootings and the Gunmen Who Carry Them Out
A gunman opened fire at Michigan State University on Feb. 13, 2023, killing three people and injuring five others before taking his own life. There have been nine mass shootings in or around college or university settings since 1966, according to The Violence Project database, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are murdered in public in a single incident. This would not include the Michigan State University shooting at this stage, or many other incidents in which fewer people than four were killed. It also doesn’t include the 1970 Kent State massacre in which four students were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard. In all the campus mass shootings in the database, the gunman was a man, with an average age of 28. The youngest was 22 and the oldest was 43. Six of the nine perpetrators were nonwhite.
A gunman opened fire at Michigan State University on Feb. 13, 2023, killing three people and injuring five others before taking his own life.
A lot is still unknown about the campus attack. Police have yet to release a motive and said the 43-year-old man responsible did not have any known connections to the university.
While rare, campus attacks are not unheard of in the U.S. In November 2022, three members of the University of Virginia football team were shot and killed on campus, and four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in their off-campus residence.
Criminologists David Riedman of the University of Central Florida and James Densley, at Metropolitan State University, maintain databases of mass shootings in the U.S. The Conversation asked them how the latest attack fit with the pattern of such attacks in the past.
How frequent are campus shootings at colleges and universities?
No agency is tracking every U.S. campus shooting in real time, and defining them can be difficult because many higher education institutions are intertwined with the surrounding community. For example, Michigan State University has over 50,000 students enrolled and more than 11,000 residing on its main campus, which is made up of more than 8 square miles (21 square kilometers) of contiguous urban, suburban, industrial and rural areas.
Technically, a shooting in the parking lot during a college football game attended by 100,000 people or at a residence that leases to college students could be classed as a college or university shooting.
We do, however, have data on mass shootings on campus.
There have been nine mass shootings in or around college or university settings since 1966, according to The Violence Project database, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are murdered in public in a single incident. This would not include the Michigan State University shooting at this stage, or many other incidents in which fewer people than four were killed. It also doesn’t include the 1970 Kent State massacre in which four students were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard.
The most deadly of these mass shootings was the 2007 attack by a student at Virginia Tech in which 32 people were killed. Since then, there have been five more mass shootings, the last being in 2015 when a 26-year-old student at Umpqua Community College near Roseburg, Oregon, fatally shot a professor and 8 students in a classroom.
