FBI releases 2025 Active Shooter Incidents Report

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has officially published its Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2025 report, providing a comprehensive assessment of active threat patterns, operational challenges, and tactical outcomes. Released as part of the Bureau’s ongoing effort to support multi-agency emergency preparedness, the annual assessment is an indispensable resource for disaster medicine planners, tactical medical providers, and security professionals worldwide responsible for mitigating the catastrophic human toll of mass casualty attacks.

The 2025 data reflects a marked resurgence in mass violence following a brief decline the previous year. The FBI designated thirty-four active shooter incidents across twenty-one states and the District of Columbia, representing a forty-two per cent surge from the twenty-four incidents documented in 2024. While this figure remains below the five-year annual average of forty-three attacks, the operational characteristics of the 2025 events reveal an increasingly calculated threat.

Attackers struck across a wide range of soft and hard targets, with incident locations categorised across commercial establishments, open public spaces, government sites, educational campuses, and houses of worship. Crucially for threat assessment teams, nearly sixty-eight per cent of shooters demonstrated clear evidence of pre-attack planning and preparation—a substantial rise from fifty-eight per cent in 2024. This trend underscores that modern perpetrators often conduct prior reconnaissance, select vulnerable egress points, and design operational plans to maximise casualties before first responders arrive.

The human cost among emergency responders featured prominently in this year’s release. Confronting heavily armed assailants in complex, rapidly unfolding scenarios resulted in three law enforcement officers losing their lives and five others sustaining serious injuries. The report emphasises that the initial minutes of an engagement remain fraught with high tactical risk, requiring rapid interdiction to neutralise the threat and prevent further loss of innocent life.

In an important addition to the ongoing series, the 2025 report introduces a dedicated analysis of potentially averted attacks. This new section highlights critical instances where attacks were successfully disrupted prior to execution due to timely public tips, vigilance by campus and school resource officers, and proactive federal and local law enforcement investigations. Including these cases demonstrates the vital role community-level reporting and threat-mitigation frameworks play in stopping active threats before they transition into kinetic mass-casualty events.

For the counter-terrorism medicine community in Europe and beyond, the findings reinforce fundamental operational doctrines for managing high-threat penetrating trauma. The deliberate nature of these incidents, combined with their dispersion across crowded civilian environments, demands that tactical emergency medical services maintain high-fidelity training for warm-zone casualty clearing and rapid haemorrhage control.

Furthermore, the operational data underscores the need to deepen multi-agency cooperation. As active shooter scenarios evolve, bridging the gap between tactical police neutralisation and rapid, protected emergency medical entry through standardised frameworks remains essential to reducing preventable mortality at the point of injury.