Giving Compass' Take:

· Ever since the recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., there has been an increase in requests for 'active shooter' coverage. Governing Magazine discusses the purpose behind this insurance and the reason so many school districts are purchasing policies.

· Will 'active shooter' insurance reduce the number of school shootings, or will it just cover the financial burden that comes after the tragedy?

· Read about and keep track of all the gun-related injuries and deaths at schools throughout 2018.

After every mass shooting, more calls come in: from private companies, from large stadiums, and -- increasingly -- from government agencies and public schools. They all want to talk about the same thing. “We probably have seen a tenfold increase in inquiries since Parkland,” says Paul Marshall, an insurance broker for McGowan Program Administrators, an underwriter based in Ohio. “People just feel vulnerable when [a shooting] happens. And that’s when we get phone calls, because it feels inevitable and very difficult to manage.”

Since the February attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., which killed 17 and launched a nationwide push for additional gun control measures, at least seven South Florida school districts have purchased about $3 million worth of “active shooter” coverage from McGowan. This kind of coverage, which the insurance broker first began offering in 2016, is a small but rapidly growing slice of the company’s portfolio. There’s no database that tracks which school districts carry this type of coverage, but Marshall says his company is consistently seeing 20 percent increases in the number of inquiries month over month. Other insurance companies are also seeing an increase in inquiries and purchases of this type of insurance. Over the course of one week shortly after Parkland, Hugh Nelson, senior vice president at Southern Insurance Underwriters Inc., says he received half a dozen inquiries. According to Reuters, while some insurance companies have offered these policies since 2011, many more have sprung up since 2016.

Read the full article about 'active shooter' insurance by Natalie Delgadillo at Governing Magazine.