The FBI active shooter report, released on July 30, 2026, provides the newest federal analysis of active shooter incidents across the United States. The year in the title refers to the incidents reviewed. The report itself is new.
Its most important finding is easy to miss: nearly 68% of the active shooter incidents identified in 2025 involved intentional planning and preparation. Those planned attacks accounted for 76% of all casualties.
For business leaders, security directors, HR teams, facilities managers, schools, healthcare systems, and houses of worship among others, this deserves attention.
Many active shooter attacks develop over time. That development can create opportunities for observation, reporting, assessment, and intervention. There are opportunities for disrupting these types of attacks if those in charge of prevention are paying proper attention.
What the New FBI Active Shooter Report Says
The FBI identified 34 active shooter incidents in 2025. They occurred across 21 states and Washington, D.C., resulting in 166 casualties. Fifty-one people were killed and 115 were wounded.
The FBI defines an active shooter as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. Active shooter incidents represent a specific subset of gun violence, so the report does not include every shooting, homicide, domestic violence incident, or firearm-related crime.
The report found:
- 34 active shooter incidents
- 166 total casualties
- 51 people killed
- 115 people wounded
- Seven incidents classified as mass killings
- 14 incidents at commerce locations
- Nearly 68% involving planning and preparation
The FBI released the report to help law enforcement, first responders, private organizations, and the public improve prevention, mitigation, and response efforts.
The 42% Increase Needs Context
The 34 incidents represented a 42% increase from the 24 incidents recorded in 2024. Total casualties increased from 106 to 166.
That annual increase is serious. The five-year picture adds necessary context.
From 2021 through 2025, the FBI identified an average of 43.4 active shooter incidents per year. The 2025 total remained below that average, and the five-year incident data shows an overall downward trend.
One year does not establish a permanent direction, but it does tell leaders where to look more closely.
The planning data and the concentration of attacks at commercial locations provide the clearest places to begin.
FBI Active Shooter Report Finds Most Incidents Involved Planning
The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit separates predatory violence from violence arising through spontaneous or impulsive emotional reactions.
Predatory attacks are intentional. The person considers, plans, or prepares for violence before acting. Warning behaviors may be present during that process, although the FBI cautions that its classifications are preliminary and depend on the information available when the report is published.
In 2025, 23 of the 34 shooters exhibited predatory behavior.
Those incidents resulted in 37 deaths and 89 injuries. They also accounted for 88% of law enforcement casualties and every security-personnel casualty documented in the report.
Planning does not guarantee that an employer, family member, school, or law enforcement agency received an obvious warning.
It does mean many attacks followed a pathway.
That pathway may include escalating grievances, fixation on violence, threatening communications, unusual surveillance, attempts to acquire weapons, testing security boundaries, researching previous attacks, or communicating plans to other people.
An organization cannot respond to information it never receives. It also cannot respond effectively when employees have no trusted reporting channel or leadership has no process for assessing what gets reported.
Commerce Locations Carried the Greatest Exposure
Commerce locations accounted for 14 incidents, or 41% of the annual total. That was an increase from 17% in 2024. More than three-quarters of the commerce incidents occurred at businesses open to the public, including retail stores, restaurants, bars, large stores, casinos, and other public-facing locations.
Those 14 attacks caused 68 casualties: 30 people were killed and 38 were wounded.
Commerce locations accounted for nearly 60% of all fatalities and 41% of all casualties recorded in the report. They also had the highest average number of fatalities per incident.
Seven commerce attackers had a previous connection to the location or a victim. Some were current or former employees. Others had previously visited the business. The remaining seven had no identified connection.
Organizations need strategies for insider threats, terminated employees, volatile customers, grievance-driven individuals, and strangers who select a business because it is accessible or symbolically important.
Active shooter preparedness belongs on the business agenda. The newest FBI data makes that difficult to dispute.
Potentially Averted Attacks Show Why Reporting Matters
For the first time in this annual series, the FBI included a section on potentially averted active shooter incidents.
The appendix describes cases disrupted through law enforcement observations, tips from members of the public, reports from family members, notifications from social media companies, student tips, and information given to school resource officers or campus police. The FBI states that these examples are illustrative and do not represent every potentially averted incident from the year.
In one case, officers found firearms, loaded magazines, body armor, and written attack plans that included a building layout.
In another, online conversations about a planned mall attack were reported to the FBI. Investigators identified the individual before the attack occurred.
A family alerted authorities after a person livestreamed plans to attack an airport. Students also reported planned school and university attacks to administrators and campus police.
Reporting systems cannot promise prevention. They can give trained people an opportunity to intervene before a threat reaches its final stage.
What Business Leaders Should Do Now
Leaders do not need to predict every possible attacker. They need systems that can recognize, receive, assess, and manage concerning information.
Start with creating a workplace violence (WPV) program that includes a WPV plan. A WPV plan should, at a minimum, include these six areas.
Create one trusted reporting path
Employees should know exactly where to report threats, escalating grievances, fixation on violence, unusual surveillance, or attempts to test security.
The reporting process should be simple, confidential when appropriate, and available beyond normal business hours.
Establish a multidisciplinary threat assessment process
Security alone cannot manage every concern.
HR, legal, operations, executive leadership, mental health professionals, and law enforcement may each hold part of the picture. A defined team can gather that information and determine the appropriate response.
Train managers to recognize behavioral patterns
Managers often see changes before senior leadership does.
Training should help them recognize escalating hostility, fixation, threatening statements, boundary testing, major behavioral changes, and other patterns that may require assessment.
Test emergency plans under realistic conditions
A written plan provides limited value when nobody has practiced it.
Organizations should test active shooter response procedures, including notification systems, lockdown and evacuation decisions, executive responsibilities, employee accountability, first-responder access, and communication with families and the public.
Evaluate physical security as a connected system
Cameras record activity. Access controls delay entry. Alarms communicate danger. Trained people make decisions.
Each layer needs to support the others. A vulnerability assessment can reveal gaps in physical security, active shooter response, and what leadership assumes will happen when an actual emergency begins.
TAL Global is standing by for leaders who want to compare notes with experienced security professionals. Bring us your current approach, your questions, or the concern that keeps resurfacing. We are right here.
Assess how recovery will be accomplished post-incident
Business activities should aim to return to normal as soon as possible after an incident. Whether that incident was consummated and injury and death occurred, or if there were threats of violence involved, the effect for business and operations can be similar in terms of disruption and ill effects on employees and customers.
Keep the Findings in Perspective
The report does not establish that every planned attack could have been prevented. It also warns against treating mental illness as a simple explanation for targeted violence.
The FBI’s behavioral research has not established a causal link between mental illness and targeted violence or terrorism. Mental illness may become one risk factor when combined with problematic behavior, impaired judgment, substance abuse, environmental stress, or other vulnerabilities.
Effective threat assessment examines behavior, circumstances, capability, access, intent, and escalation.
Labels alone tell leaders very little.
Preparation Starts Before the First Shot – Prepare for the worst
The newly released FBI active shooter report gives leaders three reasons to act.
- First, businesses experienced the largest share of incidents and fatalities in 2025.
- Second, most incidents involved planning.
- Third, prevention and preparedness work can be accomplished to better ensure a safe and secure work environment.
The strongest security and prevention programs begin well before a weapon reaches the property. They give people a way to report concerns, trained teams a way to assess them, and leaders a practical active shooter response plan for protecting people when the situation changes quickly.
If your organization already has a security posture. It may have been deliberately designed, or it may have accumulated through cameras, policies, vendors, and plans added over time.
If preparedness planning has not occurred, ensuring the company is prepared is not only usually a requirement, but a wise leadership decision. Having a proper security and risk posture under pressure before a real attacker does is the smartest action to take.
TAL Global can support the review of actual security and risk policies and procedures, or help create new ones if they are nonexistent. TAL Global subject matter experts can assess the plan, the unresolved question, or the gap your team keeps working around. We will help you determine what holds up, what needs attention, and what should happen next.
Follow us here for insights, strategy, and real-world analysis. And when you’re ready to talk security, you can always Talk To Us.
How Reaching Out Works
- Start with a conversation
Tell us about your organization, locations, people, concerns, and existing security program.
- Assess the exposure
Our experts examine vulnerabilities, reporting systems, physical security, training, policies, and response readiness.
- Build a practical plan
You receive prioritized recommendations aligned with your risks, resources, culture, and responsibilities.
About TAL Global
TAL Global is an international security consulting and risk management firm with over 28 years of proven experience. We protect people, places, assets, and logistics in an increasingly complex and connected world.
Operating across the full landscape of security risk, our work includes workplace violence prevention, executive protection, investigations, travel security, emergency preparedness, and more.
Our team includes former federal agents, military veterans, executive level leaders, and crisis response experts recognized for delivering results under pressure. We are trusted by Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and mission driven organizations worldwide.
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