What’s New
A 17-year-old female student on Monday opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, killing a teacher and a fellow student before dying by suicide, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press. Several other students were injured.
Newsweek reached out for comment to Madison Police Department and the FBI via email on Monday.
Why It Matters
The total number of mass shootings in the U.S. rose significantly in 2020 amid the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and has remained high since, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
But an overwhelming majority of assailants in major mass shootings are male, with only a handful of female shooters having ever been identified, making Monday’s gunfire an anomaly.
What To Know
Crime data shows little evidence to support the notion there has been a spike in mass shootings committed by women or girls in recent years, although there may have been an increase over the decades.
FBI statistics of incidents involving an “active shooter”—defined as a person “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area”—show that only seven female shooters were involved in a total of 226 incidents since 2019.
Only one female was an active shooter in each year except for 2020, when there were three. The FBI notes that the lone 2023 shooter, who killed six people at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, identified “as both female and transgender male.”
Among the 200 shooters involved in 195 mass shootings from 1966 to 2024, only four were female, according to the nonpartisan nonprofit group Violence Prevention Project. The Nashville shooter is included but listed as “transgender” rather than female by the group.
While the data shows no female-perpetrated mass shootings in the past several years, the small number of mass shootings that did involve females all took place within the last 18 years—in 2006, 2014, 2015 and 2019.
Violence Prevention Project defines a “mass shooting” as an event with “four or more people shot and killed, excluding the shooter, in a public location, with no connection to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs”—criteria that would exclude the incident on Monday.
What People Are Saying
Stuart Kaplan, a lawyer and former special agent of the FBI, told Newsweek on Monday night that law enforcement needs to “evolve” and recognize that profiling the identity of a shooter may no longer be “one size fits all.”
“10 years ago, 15 years ago, in discussing what an active shooter may or may not look like, it was pretty gender specific,” Kaplan said. “You would assume it was a male. I think obviously, as we’ve evolved, it’s no longer one size fits all.”
“The behavioral scientists that sit down in Quantico, who used to be able to give us a breakdown of [a shooting suspect] … I think that ship has long since sailed,” he added. “I think we need to move into a new way of looking at this.”
Kaplan added that the assailant Monday had access to firearms despite not being old enough to own a weapon. He also suggested that potential mental health issues, social media and bullying might have played a role.
What Happens Next
It is not clear what role, if any, the gender of the shooter played in Monday’s deadly gunfire. Additional details about the shooting and the shooter are likely to be revealed by investigators in the coming days and months.
The post Are Female Mass Shooters on the Rise? What Data Shows appeared first on Newsweek.
