The 10 Deadliest U.S. School Shootings
Compiled by the U.S. News library staff
1. April 16, 2007: A gunman opens fire in two buildings at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Va. Early reports indicate that at least 32 people are killed, including the shooter.
2. Aug. 1, 1966: Charles Whitman takes a rifle to the tower on the campus of the University of Texas–Austin and kills 16 people in a rampage that goes on almost nonstop for 96 minutes before Whitman is shot dead by police.
3. April 20, 1999: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walk into Columbine High School and in a rampage of gunfire and homemade bombs kill 12 students, one teacher, and themselves.
4. March 21, 2005: Jeffrey Weise, 17, goes on a shooting spree at Red Lake High School in Red Lake, Minn. He killed nine people, including his grandfather, before committing suicide.
5. Nov. 1, 1991: Gang Lu, 27, a graduate student at the University of Iowa's Department of Physics and Astronomy from China, takes a .38-caliber revolver and kills four members of his department, another university employee, and finally himself. He apparently was angry because his doctoral dissertation had not been nominated for an academic award.
6. Oct. 2, 2006: Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, kills five girls ages 7 to 13 execution-style before turning the gun on himself in a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa. Five other girls were critically injured.
7. March 24, 1998: Mitchell Johnson, 10, and Andrew Golden, 8, take seven guns to school near Jonesboro, Ark. They pull the fire alarm and start shooting as everyone exits the school, killing four students and one teacher as well as injuring nine others. They are released from a juvenile detention center in 2005.
8. Jan. 17, 1989: Patrick Edward Purdy, a drifter, enters a schoolyard and opens fire with a semiautomatic rifle at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, Calif., killing five children and wounding one teacher and 29 other children. He then kills himself.
9. Oct. 28, 2002: Robert Flores, 40, a nursing student at the University of Arizona, shoots an instructor in her office on campus and then enters a classroom and kills two more teachers before committing suicide.
10. May 4, 1970: National Guard troops killed four students participating in antiwar protests on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.
Sources:
Associated Press
CNN
Daily Iowan
Minnesota Public Radio
Reuters
Rocky Mountain News