It’s not a bad dream. School shootings really are happening more often than ever.

Gun Safety organization Everytown produced a list of every American school shooting reported in the media since the tragedy at Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook elementary school in December 2012. In all, there have been 74 school shootings in the year and a half since Newtown.

The Huffington Post’s Mark Gongloff took the Everytown Data and mapped it:

Your gut feeling is right: School shootings have skyrocketed in recent years. In January 2013, the Ploychart blog tracked the number of American school shootings since 1979, using data from Jessie Klein’s book “The Bully Society.’’ Starting with three confirmed shootings in 1979, the number of shootings per year slowly swell, jumping to the upper single-digits in the late 80s and through the 90s.


The shootings actually dipped at the start of the new millennium, but skyrocketed in 2006. What was once the high-water mark for shootings in a year–nine–became the floor. In 2009, there were 18 school shootings. There were 16 in 2010 and eight in 2011.

Stein’s data ends in 2011. Everytown tracked 37 for 2013 and 37 so far in 2014. The Everytrown and Stein data sets don’t follow the same methodology, so they should not be viewed as one piece (meaning don’t just add the Everytown data to the end of the Stein data). Still, the trend is undeniably going in the wrong direction.