This year the U.S. is on track to reach historic heights in school shootings and overall gun mass violence.

Shootings in K-12 schools that resulted in injury and/or death hit a record of 34 in 2021, according to data maintained by Education Week, an independent organization providing education news and information. At just over halfway through this calendar year, there have been 27.

Overall mass shootings data from the Gun Violence Archive, an independent, nonprofit data collection and research group, show that in 2014 mass shootings numbered 269, but after rising over the years, they spiked to 611 in 2020, and 692 last year. So far this year there have been 399. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as four people shot, either injured or killed, not including the shooter.

The K-12 School Shooting Database, a more inclusive database documenting all the times a gun was brandished in any way on U.S. K-12 campuses, counts 2,069 school shootings since 1970 — and a dramatic acceleration in the past five years. In 43% of the cases, the shooter was a student. A total of 684 fatalities and 1,937 injuries have resulted from those school shootings, according to the database maintained by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense.

The April 20, 1999, rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., is considered the event that launched the nation’s current awareness and fear of school shootings. Two teens killed 13 people and wounded more than 20 others before committing suicide. At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

The ensuing years have brought the nation additional campus massacres so numerous and costly in lives that mentions of just the schools or towns are enough to evoke horror: Sandy Hook, Conn., in 2012; Parkland, Fla., in 2018; Uvalde, Texas, this year; and more. The Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 is considered the deadliest, with 32 students and faculty members lost.

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Educational institutions are the second-most common location for active-­shooter incidents in the U.S., after businesses, according to a California state auditor report.

“Mass shootings are, for the most part an American phenomenon,” notes the Gun Violence Archive.

While rising campus shootings and mass violence have long felt far from Hawaii because of their physical distance, the islands’ sparse history of gun incidents at schools, and stricter gun laws here, law enforcement experts say the state must prepare for the possibility.

In 1988 an Aiea High School teacher was injured by a student with a gun, and in 2014 police shot at a Roosevelt High School student who wielded a knife. There have been other shooting incidents near schools, but they did not involve students or teachers, a Honolulu Police Department spokesperson said.

Hawaii has had one mass shooting: On Nov. 2, 1999, disgruntled employee Byran Uyesugi opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol at the Xerox corporate office in Honolulu, killing seven people and wounding one.