What the FBI’s 2025 Active Shooter Report Means for Workplace and Facility Security
The FBI’s 2025 Active Shooter Incidents in the United States report offers organizations a useful benchmark for evaluating active shooter preparedness, emergency communication, and physical security planning. The FBI designated 34 active shooter incidents in 2025, up from 24 in 2024 but still below the five-year average of 43 incidents annually. Those incidents resulted in 51 deaths and 115 people wounded.
The locations are particularly relevant for organizations responsible for protecting employees, students and the public. Incidents occurred across commercial, educational, government, open-space and houses-of-worship environments. Katherine Schweit, who created and led the FBI’s Active Shooter Program and has spent years studying these events, highlights an important point in her analysis: 14 of the 34 incidents occurred in places of commerce.
Another significant finding is that nearly 68% of the incidents involved planning and preparation by the shooter. The FBI’s report also includes a new section examining potentially averted attacks, including cases in which information was reported to law enforcement, school resource officers or campus police.
For commercial facilities, schools, government buildings and industrial environments, these findings reinforce the value of looking at security as a coordinated system rather than a collection of individual technologies. Access control, video surveillance, intrusion detection and emergency procedures each serve a purpose, but communication also matters when an incident is unfolding.
That includes public address and mass notification systems capable of delivering clear instructions quickly across a facility. Layer One’s Layers of Protection approach considers these systems as part of a broader physical security strategy designed around the people, operations and risks of each environment.
The report does not suggest that every organization faces the same threat. It does make a strong case for reviewing how facilities identify risk, communicate during emergencies and prepare people to respond.
Sources: FBI — 2025 Active Shooter Incidents in the United States | Katherine Schweit — Analysis of the 2025 FBI Active Shooter Report
