A shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida on Wednesday left 17 people dead and over a dozen more injured.

The shooting marks the 18th gun-related incident on school grounds so far this year. Some of the incidents were suicides and others were accidents that resulted in no injuries.



A gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Wednesday afternoon, killing at least 17 people and injuring over a dozen more, authorities said.

The shooting is the 18th gun-related incident on the grounds of an elementary, middle, or high school (plus colleges and universities) since the start of the year, according to a running count by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a non-profit organization that tracks gun-related violence in the US. It is not affiliated with any advocacy group.

A gun-related incident, according to the GVA, can mean anything from a suicide, a stray bullet being fired into a building from off school grounds, an altercation in the school's parking lot overnight, and, of course, an individual shooting at students.

"Most of these are sad and frightening in their own way, but they were not all cut from the same bloody cloth," read an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in January.

School shootings have become all too familiar in the wake of massacres at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, but these incidents are very different from a stray bullet ricocheting off a dormitory or a student accidentally discharging a firearm during a gun training session.

"Using the term 'school shooting' to describe events in which the shooter intended no harm to anyone but himself, or where a gun was fired accidentally, is plainly misleading," opinion writer Becket Adams wrote in the Washington Examiner.

Nevertheless, 18 is a high number, and reflects a cultural problem that lawmakers and the general public have been unable to effectively address.

These are all of the gun-related incidents on school grounds in 2018 so far. Shootings with fatalities have an asterisk: