Nashville school massacre: Why women mass shooters are rare in the US

The shooter who killed six people, including three 9-year-old pupils and three adults, at a Christian elementary school in Tennessee’s capital city Nashville in the United States on Monday (27 March) was a former student who had prepared a detailed map of the school, as per the police. Armed with two assault-style weapons and a handgun, the assailant entered The Covenant School by firing through a side door, John Drake, the chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said, as per The New York Times (NYT). The attacker went to the second floor and fired at the arriving officers, before being killed by police. The police identified the shooter as 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale. There was confusion regarding the attacker’s gender, who earlier the police said was a woman but later said Hale identified as transgender. Citing a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, NYT reported that Hale identified as male in recent months. As per Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit that tracks gun violence data, this was America’s 129th mass shooting this year. Let’s take a closer look at how most mass shootings are carried out by men in the US. Rare mass shootings by women According to the Violence Project, a nonprofit research group, it is quite rare for a mass shooter to be a woman. The nonprofit describes mass shootings as where four or more people are killed. The database compiled by the project on every mass shooting in the US since 1966 shows that the majority of the massacres are carried out by men between the ages of 18 and 25, Dr Jillian Peterson, a researcher at Hamline University, told Insider. 

As per the database, 98 per cent of mass shootings have been committed by men.

In a statement after the Nashville shooting, the group said: “The shooting today is a stark reminder that mass shootings are not exclusive to men”. “However, if we look specifically at K-12 school shooting cases in our database, the perpetrators were 100 per cent male. Most were current or former students of the schools they targeted”, the statement added, as per USA Today. [caption id=“attachment_12365802” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale identified as male in recent months, as per reports. AP[/caption] According to separate data collated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), out of the 61 mass shooters in 2021, only one was female. In 2020, out of 42 mass shooters recorded by the FBI, 35 were men, Insider reported. Instances of women mass shooters It was previously believed that Hale was the first female school shooter to have killed four or more people, the Violence Project said, as per USA Today. However, there have been instances of mass shootings carried out by women in the past. As per the Project’s database, four of the 191 mass shooters in the US since 1966 have been women, reported New York Post.

Two out of these four women had partnered with a male gunman.

In 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego killing two adults and leaving nine, including eight children injured. When asked why she carried out the massacre, Spencer, who remains in a California prison, had told a reporter: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” In 2006, Jennifer San Marco opened fire at a sorting centre where she had worked in California’s Goleta, killing six postal workers before taking her own life. She had also shot dead a former neighbour earlier that day, reported New York Post. In 2015, Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Farook gunned down 14 and injured another 17 people at a social services facility in San Bernardino, California. In another recent instance of gun violence carried out by a woman, Nasim Aghdam shot and wounded three people before fatally shooting herself at YouTube’s headquarters near San Francisco in 2018. The police said she was upset with the video platform’s practices and policies. The same year, a former employee of Rite Aid support facility in Maryland’s Aberdeen city, 26-year-old Snochia Moseley, shot three people and injured three others before taking her own life, as per CNN. Why do mass shootings occur at schools? The Violence Project mapped the life histories of school mass shooters. It found that 92 per cent of the shooters were suicidal before the shooting or took their own lives during the attack. The project says 85 per cent of the school mass shooters showed signs of a crisis leading up to the attack. Around 93 per cent had shared their plans before committing gun violence, mostly with a classmate. Nearly 73 per cent of the mass shooters had a history of childhood trauma, reported USA Today. As many as 64 per cent showed an interest in or studied previous mass shootings, the project said.

Check out our other stories on gun violence in the US America’s Darkest Side: How gun violence claims 114 lives on an average every day Nashville shooting: A look back at the worst gun violence in US schools Nashville school shooting: Who was the transgender woman who killed 6, including 9-year-old pupils?

Why are men more prone to carry out gun violence? Experts say men are more prone to committing violence, including mass shootings. Speaking to USA Today, Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama, said men involved in such massacres “are usually due to an unhealthy amount of their self-worth to status and so in many cases, men and boys are killing to achieve status or to defend their status.” “Men commit the overwhelming majority of mass shootings for basically the same reasons they commit most violent crimes,” Dewey G Cornell, a licensed forensic clinical psychologist, told CNN in 2018. “Men tend to be more violent than women because of a complex interaction of evolutionary and psycho-social factors. Men tend to be more aggressive and less inhibited by empathy, and men in distress seem to be less willing to turn to others for help,” he added. [caption id=“attachment_12365812” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] The Nashville massacre was America’s 129th mass shooting this year. AP[/caption] The Violence Project says men are behind more than 90 per cent of homicides worldwide because of a “host of biological, social, economic, and cultural factors, including societal expectations and gender roles.” Mark Bryant, executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, told USA Today that out of 4,025 mass shootings since 2013, 101 incidents involved a female shooter. It describes a mass shooting where four or more people are killed or injured, not including the shooter. As per Insider, Bryant said that more men are responsible for mass shootings than women because they “turn to guns as a tool more easily than women do”. “Guys, in general, from the time they were three or five have played with guns and so there’s more of a straight-up use of guns as a tool,” Bryant said. “When it comes time, guys are more fascinated by guns than girls tend to be.” With inputs from agencies Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.