Wisconsin shooting suspect is female. It's rare, data showsExBulletin

The campus of Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, where a teenage girl opened fire Monday. Andy Manis/Getty Images .

switch captionAndy Manis/Getty Images

A suspect opened fire Monday at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, killing two people and injuring six others before dying from what police believe was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

It was one of more than 320 shootings that took place on school grounds this year alone, according to the Elementary and Secondary School Shootings Database.

While school shootings are widespread in the United States, this one is unusual because of the identity of the alleged perpetrator: authorities have identified her as a 15-year-old girl.

Data shows that female shooters in schools and in general are relatively rare.

An FBI review of active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2019 found that of the 345 total perpetrators, 332 were men and only 13 were women.

Similar statistics hold true for mass shootings, which the FBI defines as any incident in which four or more people are murdered with a firearm (so Monday's does not meet this criterion).

According to a Department of Justice database, 97.7% of perpetrators of mass shootings between 1966 and 2019 were men.

The nonprofit Violence Prevention Project says that of the 200 shooters involved in mass shootings between 1999 and 2024, only four identified as women and one as transgender, referring to the attacker during the shooting. 2023 shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee.

What makes female shooters rare and different

Jillian Peterson, co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project, forensic psychologist and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University, says many school shooters “see themselves” in the perpetrators of other tragedies who have always been men . Only nine female students have committed school shootings since 1999, according to a Washington Post analysis.

“A lot of school shooters study Columbine, for example,” Peterson told NPR in 2021. “Other college shooters study the Virginia Tech shooting. And they kind of use those previous shootings as a model for their own.”

More generally, as NPR has reported over the years, experts say men are more likely than women to blame others (rather than their own flaws), which could translate into anger and hostility.

And men tend to be more comfortable with guns than women, who studies show are more likely to choose a knife if they resort to violence.

Researchers Jason Silva and Margaret Schmuhl explored the demographics, motivations and incidents of female shooters between 1979 and 2019 for an article published in the Journal of Mass Violence Research in 2021.

They said existing studies attribute mass shootings among men to “some form of male failing or a crisis of masculinity,” often “motivated by grievances against women.”

In contrast, they found that female mass shooters are not motivated by relationship conflicts, often target workplaces, and are more likely to work in pairs, “particularly when engaging in ideologically motivated attacks.” “.

“Just as women have shown distinct trends and patterns in homicide…it is important that research also distinguishes and understands female mass murderers,” they wrote.

Examples of female shooters in recent United States history

Shootings by female suspects have made headlines in recent years, particularly in the past decade.

In 2006, a former U.S. Postal Service employee shot and killed six people at a postal facility in Goleta, California, before killing herself. Authorities said writings later discovered at the home of the woman, who suffered from mental illness, indicated she believed she was threatened by a plot involving postal workers.

In 2018, a woman apparently angry with YouTube opened fire at the company's headquarters in San Bruno, California, injuring several people before killing herself.

That same year, a temporary worker killed three people and then shot himself at a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland. While authorities and some friends initially identified the attacker as a woman, some media outlets later reported that the shooter had begun identifying as transgender in the years before the shooting.

Women were also among couples who committed shootings, such as in the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, and the 2019 shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Teenager was behind 1979 school shooting that inspired hit song

Teenager Brenda Spencer leaves court in Santa Ana, California, in 1979 after pleading guilty to two counts of murder in the San Diego school attack in which two adults were killed earlier that year. /Associated Press .

./Associated Press

An infamous school shooting by a young girl occurred in January 1979, when 16-year-old Brenda Spencer shot through the window of her San Diego home at children arriving at the San Diego elementary school. other side of the street.

Nine children and two adults, the director and the janitor, were killed in the attack.

Steve Wiegand, a reporter for the San Diego Evening Tribune, began calling random homes near Grover Cleveland Elementary School to talk to potential eyewitnesses. He first contacted Spencer, and after talking for a while, he felt like the gunshots were coming from his house. Wiegand asked why she did that.

“She said, 'Because I don't like Mondays. Do you like Mondays? You know, it livens up the day,'” he recalls.

On the other side of the country, Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Irish new wave group Boomtown Rats, was being interviewed on a radio station in Atlanta when he saw a report about the incident circulating on the networks.

Struck by Spencer's phrasing, he returned to his hotel room and wrote “I don't like Mondays.” The song, released in July 1979, spent four weeks at the top of the UK singles chart.

Spencer, meanwhile, was charged as an adult, pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to life in prison.

She will be eligible for parole in 2025, and California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records show a hearing is scheduled for February.

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