With Shootings on the Rise, Schools Turn to 'Active Shooter' Insurance

Gun violence costs lives -- and money. The financial burden can overwhelm governments, especially when they're small or struggling.

After every mass shooting, more calls come in: from private companies, from large stadiums, and -- increasingly -- from government agencies and public schools. They all want to talk about the same thing. “We probably have seen a tenfold increase in inquiries since Parkland,” says Paul Marshall, an insurance broker for McGowan Program Administrators, an underwriter based in Ohio. “People just feel vulnerable when [a shooting] happens. And that’s when we get phone calls, because it feels inevitable and very difficult to manage.”

Since the February attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., which killed 17 and launched a nationwide push for additional gun control measures, at least seven South Florida school districts have purchased about $3 million worth of “active shooter” coverage from McGowan. This kind of coverage, which the insurance broker first began offering in 2016, is a small but rapidly growing slice of the company’s portfolio. There’s no database that tracks which school districts carry this type of coverage, but Marshall says his company is consistently seeing 20 percent increases in the number of inquiries month over month. Other insurance companies are also seeing an increase in inquiries and purchases of this type of insurance. Over the course of one week shortly after Parkland, Hugh Nelson, senior vice president at Southern Insurance Underwriters Inc., says he received half a dozen inquiries. According to Reuters, while some insurance companies have offered these policies since 2011, many more have sprung up since 2016.

It’s one trend following another, deeply troubling one: The incidence of active shooter events is going up. According to FBI data, the average number of shootings per year jumped from 6.4 between 2000 and 2006 to 16.4 in the period from 2007 to 2013. (Overall, active shooter incidents, which the FBI defines as events in which an individual is actively engaged in attempting to kill people in a populated area, claimed 1,043 lives between 2000 and 2013.) In 2014 and 2015, that number rose again, to 20 shootings per year. About 10 percent of those occurred on government property, while an additional 24 percent occurred in schools. In fact, according to data recently compiled byThe Washington Post, since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., some 208,000 children at 212 schools have experienced gun violence on campus.

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