Are we doing enough?: How security measures influence the likelihood of school shootings

School shootings are a tragedy that all of America invests hundreds of thousands of dollars into preventing. Considering not only financial investment involved but the safety of our children, understanding how effective the security measures implemented are. The following study utilizes factorial analysis and data mining methods to create a predictive model that determines how effective security measures utilized by the public school system are in at predicting whether shootings will occur. Exploratory factor analysis determined that two factors are present in the security measures utilized. These factors represent two approaches to security: One being minimizing risk of shootings and the other mitigating damage. Previous research indicates that methods that are proactive and address the reasonings for school shootings are more effective in the prevention than methods that are designed to intimidate potential shooters. The data mining methodology utilized was random forest, which produced results that align with previous research. That being security efforts that minimize risk are more effective than security efforts mitigate damage. Unfortunately, due to the small number of shootings in the data, not enough variance was obtained to determine if any security measures are effective in preventing school shootings.