 "15-year-old girl behind Wisconsin school shooting: How common are female shooters in US?")
America has failed to rein in its horrific culture of gun violence. Every year, the United States is haunted by incidents of mass shootings, including at schools, that claim innocent lives.
Now, another tragic school shooting has come to haunt the country. A 15-year-old female student opened fire at a small Christian school in Wisconsin, killing two people and injuring six others on Monday (December 16).
This is a rare case of an active shooting involving a female assailant in the US.
Let’s take a closer look.
What happened?
A teenager opened fire inside a study hall at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin on Monday morning.
She killed a teacher and a fellow student, while wounding six others, two of whom were critical, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said, as per Associated Press (AP).
Barnes said the two victims are in critical condition and have life-threatening injuries.
“A teacher and three students were treated for non-life threatening injuries, and two of those have been released,” he added.
The police identified the shooter as Natalie Rupnow , who went by the name “Samantha”.
The Madison Police chief said Rupnow died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and was declared dead on the way to the hospital. He did not offer more details about the shooter.
A law enforcement official told AP that the shooter used a 9mm pistol.
The police have said they are trying to find the motive behind the attack. “I don’t know why, and I feel like if we did know why, we could stop these things from happening,” Barnes told reporters.
Speaking to CNN, a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation said that the attack was planned in advance by the suspect. The source said the 15-year-old was dealing with some problems, which she expressed in writing.
The police are speaking to the suspect’s father and other family members, the Madison Police chief said.
The shooting was reported by a second-grade student, who would likely be 7 or 8 years old, he said, adding “let that soak in for a minute”.
President Joe Biden described the shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School as “shocking and unconscionable”.
“We need Congress to act. Now,” he said in a statement.
“From Newtown to Uvalde, Parkland to Madison, to so many other shootings that don’t receive attention - it is unacceptable that we are unable to protect our children from this scourge of gun violence. We cannot continue to accept it as normal,” he said. “Every child deserves to feel safe in their class room. Students across our country should be learning how to read and write – not having to learn how to duck and cover.”
US school shootings
Mass shootings have been on the rise in the US since 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The American non-profit describes a mass shooting as an attack in which four or more people were shot or killed, not including the shooter.
The Congressional Research Service states that a mass shooting is when the shooter kills four or more people, selecting victims randomly in a public place.
School shootings have also become a grim reality in the US, with 322 incidents this year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database website.
This is the highest in any year since 1966, second only to last year’s total of 349 such shootings, Reuters reported citing the database.
As per CNN, the Wisconsin school shooting is at least the 83rd such attack in a school in the US this year.
How common are female shooters?
Studies show that only about 3 per cent of all US mass shootings have been carried out by females.
According to the nonpartisan nonprofit group Violence Prevention Project, the US saw 195 mass shootings from 1966 to 2024 involving 200 shooters, of which only four were female.
It 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”.
David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database, said last year that school shootings carried out by girls are highly rare in US history, reported AP.
He said most of the perpetrators in the majority of the school shootings are males in their teens and 20s.
Only a handful of shooters have been female, making the Wisconsin school shooting a rarity.
As per Newsweek, there is little evidence to show that mass shootings by women or girls have surged in recent years in the US.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines an active shooter incident as “an individual engaging in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.”
The premier law-enforcement agency’s data shows that of the 226 incidents involving an active shooter since 2019, only seven were female. In 2020 alone, there were three female active shooters.
Last year, 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who reportedly identified “as both female and transgender male”, killed six people at a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee.
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.
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 incident, 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.
Why are female shootings rare?
There is no clear answer to this question.
Dewey G Cornell, a licensed forensic clinical psychologist, told CNN in 2018 that it is hard to answer why women are rarely involved in active shootings as there is no single profile of such assailants.
“Men commit the overwhelming majority of mass shootings for basically the same reasons they commit most violent crimes,” he said.
“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,” Cornell added.
With inputs from agencies
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