Wisconsin shooting suspect is female. It’s rare, data says: NPR

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

It is one of more than 320 shootings that have taken place on school grounds this year alone, according to K-12 school shooting database.

While school shootings are common 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 from 2000 to 2019 found that of the total of 345 perpetrators, 332 were men and only 13 were women.

Similar statistics show up when it comes to mass shootings, which the FBI defines as any incident in which at least four people are murdered with a gun (so Monday’s doesn’t meet that criteria).

A staggering 97.7% of perpetrators of mass shootings from 1966 to 2019 were men, according to a The Ministry of Justice’s database.

The non-profit organization Violence prevention project says out of the 200 shooters involved in mass shootings between 1999 and 2024, only four identified as female and one as transgender — referring to the gunman in the 2023 shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville.

What makes female shooters rare – and different

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

“A lot of school shooters study Columbine, for example,” Peterson told NPR in 2021. “Other college shooters study the Virginia Tech shooting. And they really use the previous shootings as a blueprint 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 shortcomings), which can translate into anger and hostility.

And men tend to be more comfortable firing guns than women, studies show more likely to choose a knife if they turn to violence.

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

They say existing studies attribute male mass shootings to “a form of male victim entitlement or crisis of masculinity,” often “motivated by grievances against women.”

In contrast, they found that female mass shooters are not motivated by relationship conflict, often target workplaces, and are more likely to work as part of a couple, “especially when engaging in ideologically motivated attacks.”

“Just as women have shown clear trends and patterns in homicide offending … it is important for research to also distinguish and understand female mass shooters,” they write.

Examples of female shooters in recent American history

Shootings by female suspects have made headlines in recent years, especially in the last decade.

In 2006, a former US Postal Service employee fatally shot six people at a post office in Goleta, California before she took her own life. Authorities said writings were later found at the home of the woman who had been struggling mental illnessindicated that she believed she was threatened by a conspiracy involving postal workers.

In 2018, a woman with an apparent grudge against YouTube opened fire at the company’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, injuring several people before fatally shooting herself.

That same year, a temporary employee fatally shot three people — and then himself — at a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, Md. While authorities and some friends initially identified the perpetrator as female, some media outlets later reported that they had started identify as transgender in the years before the shooting.

Women were also part of couples who carried out shootings, such as the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, and the 2019 shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, NJ

A teenage girl was behind the 1979 school shooting that inspired a hit song

An infamous female school shooting occurred in January 1979, when 16-year-old Brenda Spencer fired from the window of her San Diego home at children arriving at the elementary school across the street.

Nine children and two adults – the principal and the janitor – were killed in the attack.

Steve Wiegand, a reporter with San Diego Evening Tribunebegan randomly calling homes near Grover Cleveland Elementary School to talk to potential eyewitnesses. He first came into contact with Spencer and after talking for a while he got the feeling that the shots had come from her house. Wiegand asked why she did it.

“She said ’cause I just don’t like Mondays. Do you like Mondays? You know, it just livens up the day,” he recalled.

On the other side of the country, Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Irish new wave band Boomtown Rats, was being interviewed on an Atlanta radio station when he saw a news story about the incident come over his head.

Struck by Spencer’s phrasing, he went back to his hotel room and wrote “I Don’t Like Mondays.” Released in July 1979, the song spent four weeks on at the top of the singles chart in Great Britain.

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 entitled to parole in 2025, and California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records show she has one hearing scheduled for February.