On June 8 2022, a popular Imgur video post purportedly showed Wikipedia’s “List of School Shootings in the United States,” which is so extensive that it took a dishearteningly long time to scroll through:
The clip (“Wanted to read up on school shootings and have an overview of the incidents when …”) showed a video of the submitter (u/UserProfileName) rapidly scrolling through what appeared to be an extremely long entry. At the beginning of the video, the Wikipedia entry‘s title was visible: “List of school shootings in the United States.”
Also visible at the start of the clip was text at the top of the entry, which said:
School shootings in the United States have occurred at K–12 public and private schools, as well as at colleges and universities, and on school buses. Excluded from this list are the following:
- Incidents that occurred during wars
- Incidents that occurred as a result of police actions
- Murder-suicides by rejected suitors or estranged spouses
- Suicides or suicide attempts involving only one person.
Shootings by school staff, where the only victims are other employees, are covered at workplace killings.
Much of the entry’s “Talk” section was dated on or after the May 24 2022 Robb Elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. A June 4 2022 “Talk” subsection (“Hubbard Woods Elementary School, Winnetka Illinois. 1988”) proposed adding information about an incident the editor believed had been left off the list:
This school was left off the list. The shooter was 30 year old Laurie Dann. She killed 1 child, herself and injured 6 others. May 20, 1988[.]
A responding Wikipedia editor explained that although the page was titled “List of school shootings in the United States,” it was not the site’s only entry listing school shootings in the United States:
That is in List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)#1980s. Makes me ill we have to break this into two articles for length.
As indicated by several Imgur commenters and on the entry’s discussion page, a separate entry existed. It was not featured in the video, and was titled “List of school shootings in the United States (before 2000).”
The second entry for school shootings in the United States was broken up by century, then by decade. A total of 32 school shootings were counted from 1840 through 1900.
A total of 293 school shootings occurred between 1900 and 1999, with 325 school shootings in total on the “before 2000” page. The page from 2000 onward did not have a “total” section like the “before 2000” entry did, likely because the list was regularly updated.
On June 8 2022, an Imgur user shared a video of the extensive scrolling for Wikipedia’s “List of school shootings in the United States” page. That page was not comprehensive, and featured a link to a second page listing all school shootings between 1840 and 1999 — an additional 325 entries. As seen in the video, five types of incidents (including “shootings by school staff”) were excluded from the list.