The threat of gun violence has become a fact of life for America’s schools. News headlines highlight local schools going into lockdown almost daily. In recent weeks, schools in New Mexico, Virginia and Florida had to secure buildings or otherwise halt operations due to reports of a gun on or near campus. 

A new report from the Pew Research Center illustrates just how pervasive the threat has become. Roughly 1 in 4 teachers in a nationally representative survey said their campus had at least one gun-related lockdown in the last school year. Eight percent of the respondents said a lockdown due to reports of a firearm happened more than once that year.

These weren’t drills. These were, according to the teachers’ reports, incidents of guns or suspected guns on their campuses. The lockdowns were especially common at urban campuses and high schools, where roughly a third of educators said these emergencies happened at least once in the past year. 

Many of the lockdowns may have been false alarms. However, schools and communities have continued to see high rates of gun violence. In 2024, there have been at least 50 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, according to research by the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. Sixteen people were killed and nearly three dozen were injured in school shootings. Firearm-related deaths among children and teens rose 50% from 2019 to 2021, the year more Americans died of gun injuries than any on record. 

Most respondents in the Pew report said they were at least somewhat worried about the prospect of a shooting happening at their school. That included nearly a fifth who said they were extremely or very worried about it. 

“As they’re going to work every day, this is something that’s on their minds,” said Juliana Horowitz, associate director of research at Pew. The research organization decided to poll teachers about this topic after informal conversations with educators across the country revealed how concerned they were about school safety and gun violence. 

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Teachers feel ill-prepared for school shootings

Teachers’ anxieties are compounded by a sense, across a wide swath of those surveyed, that they would be ill-equipped to deal with an active shooter on campus. Pluralities of respondents, including nearly half of urban educators, said their schools had done a poor or fair job of preparing them for such a scenario. Fewer than a third of teachers said the training provided had been very good or excellent. 

“There’s trauma in that worry,” said Abbey Clements, a veteran educator who was teaching at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, when a gunman entered and killed 26 people. When a lockdown occurs, Clements said, a teacher’s mind starts racing as she wonders what to do and how she’ll be able to keep all her students safe. The anxiety doesn’t just go away once the lockdown is lifted.

“No teacher signed up to be a sharpshooter or a first responder,” she said, yet “we know there isn’t one teacher who doesn’t have it at the back of his or her mind” that a shooting could happen on their campus.

Pew researchers contacted more than 2,500 K-12 teachers conducted last fall as part of the national survey. It's the first time Pew has polled educators in this way. The findings complement a separate survey conducted among parents two years prior, in which a third of respondents said they were very or extremely worried about a prospective school shooting. 

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The teacher survey asked participants what they thought were the best ways to prevent school violence. A majority of educators who identified as Democrats and Republicans said they believe improving mental health screenings and treatment is an effective strategy, including 73% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans. 

There was less partisan consensus about other strategies. Republican and Republican-leaning teachers were significantly more likely than their left-leaning counterparts to support putting armed officers (69%) or metal detectors (43%) in schools. They were also far more likely to call for arming teachers: 28% of right-leaning educators said it would be effective, compared with just 3% of Democratic teachers. 

Max Eden, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he’s skeptical of any strategy that promises to be a cure-all. But he highlighted increasing rates of disciplinary and other behavioral problems on K-12 campuses since the pandemic, suggesting the widespread lockdowns are a symptom of schools’ failure to effectively address students' behavior. Educators' instinct to use restorative justice, which focuses on mediation over punishment, may be fueling challenges that culminate in a lockdown, he said. 

“The schools are responding to broader levels of chaos, disorder and threatening behavior laxly, which creates enough of a permission structure for students to take it to the level at which they meet resistance,” he said. 

Hardening schools by having armed officials and even educators on campus could help create the structure needed to prevent lockdowns, in Eden's view. 

Survey:Most US teachers think schools would be less safe if they were armed

In Tennessee, legislation that would arm teachers is making its way through the Legislature. The proposal, following a mass shooting at a Nashville school last year that killed three children and three adults, passed by the state's GOP-controlled Senate on Tuesday and is headed for a floor vote in the state House. 

Barbara Sloan is a student at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University, where she’s studying to be a teacher and is training in a local classroom. The bill advancing for her represents “another example of how people are ignoring the actual issue, which is accessibility to guns,” she said. 

The prospect of a shooting happening in her classroom, she said, “is something I think about daily.” It’s made her consider whether she should teach in another country or even pursue the profession at all. But she’s dedicated to the community, including students who don’t have the luxury of moving to another country, and to advocating for stricter gun control. 

“We just want to teach and students just want to learn,” she said. “That shouldn’t be something that’s a death sentence."