Research & Reports

The FBI’s 2025 Active Shooter Report: What Organizations Should Notice

The latest FBI report contains more than incident totals. Its findings on planning, preparation, reporting, and potentially averted attacks deserve careful attention.

On July 30, 2026, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its 2025 Active Shooter Incidents in the United States report. The annual publication is intended to help law enforcement, emergency responders, private organizations, and the public better understand active-shooter incidents and improve prevention, mitigation, and response.

The report should not be read as a count of every shooting or every act of gun violence in the United States. The FBI uses a specific definition of an active shooter: one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.

What the FBI Reported

For 2025, the FBI designated 34 incidents as active-shooter incidents. That was a 42% increase from the 24 incidents designated in 2024, although the 2025 total remained below the five-year average of 43 incidents per year. Incidents occurred in 21 states and Washington, D.C., across commerce, open-space, government, education, and house-of-worship settings.

The Number That Deserves Attention

The FBI reported that nearly 68% of the 2025 incidents involved planning and preparation by the shooter, up from 58% in 2024. Planning does not automatically mean that warning behavior will be visible to others, but it reinforces why prevention work must look beyond the moment an attack begins.

A New Focus on Attacks That Did Not Happen

One of the most important additions to the 2025 report is a section describing potentially averted active-shooter incidents. The FBI says these cases involved law-enforcement observations, tips to the FBI or local agencies, or information provided to school resource officers and campus police.

That matters because prevention is difficult to measure. Successful intervention often produces no dramatic event, no casualty count, and no headline. A concern is reported, information is evaluated, intervention occurs, and the feared attack never takes place.

What Organizations Should Take From It

1. Reporting systems matter

People need to know where to take a concern and what information is useful. A reporting process that is confusing, inaccessible, or perceived as pointless can cause valuable observations to remain isolated.

2. Context matters more than a checklist

No single behavior should be treated as proof that someone will become violent. Behavioral information becomes more meaningful when it is considered with changes over time, circumstances, communications, stressors, grievances, planning activity, and other relevant facts.

3. Prevention and response are different capabilities

Emergency planning, access control, alarms, and active-shooter response remain important. They address what organizations do when danger is immediate. Behavioral awareness and threat assessment address an earlier question: what can be recognized, reported, assessed, or managed before an emergency reaches that point?

The Kinesic Media Perspective

The FBI’s 2025 findings reinforce a central idea behind BTAP: the objective is not to predict the future from one behavior. It is to become more capable of noticing meaningful information, changes, and circumstances that may deserve additional attention—and to make sure those observations reach the people who can evaluate them responsibly.

The most valuable lesson in a report like this is not simply the number of attacks that occurred. It is that prevention can begin with ordinary people recognizing that something has changed, taking the concern seriously, and getting the information to the right place.

Sources & Further Reading

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