The Wisconsin school shooter was a female. That's rare.
Most shootings in the U.S. are carried out by males, according to data.
Police identified the school shooter in Madison, Wis., as a 15-year-old female student — an occurrence experts say is rare. Monday’s shooting at Abundant Life Christian School left three people dead, including the female shooter, and six others injured.
Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said on Monday that when officers arrived at the scene, they found the shooter, identified as Natalie Rupnow, with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound and she was pronounced dead while being taken to the hospital. The shooter used a 9mm pistol, according to police who said they were trying to trace the gun.
Rupnow has now joined the small list of female shooting perpetrators in the U.S.
“Females comprise about 4% to 5% of all mass shooters,” Jaclyn Schildkraut, the executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, told Yahoo News. The institute’s data focuses on mass public shootings, not just school shootings. Adam Lankford, professor of criminology at the University of Alabama, told Yahoo News, “In general, about 95% of public mass shootings are committed by men.”
The Violence Prevention Project database has tracked mass shootings since 1996. They found that males disproportionately commit mass shootings, (98%) vs. females (2%) or transgender individuals (fewer than 1%). It defines a “mass shooting” as an occurrence where “four or more people [are] shot and killed, excluding the shooter, in a public location, with no connection to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs.”
The Washington Post has been tracking school shootings that happen during the school day on K-12 campuses dating back to the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. Under its parameters, 4% of school shooters are female.
What's the difference in characteristics between male and female shooters?
Lankford explained that, generally, “it was long assumed that men are just more aggressive than women. Now there's research that says maybe men and women and boys and girls are more similar when it comes to aggression or anger, but the behaviors it leads to, differ.”
Those types of behaviors, according to Lankford, include the type of murder weapon used and the motive behind targeting certain victims.
“When it comes to weapons preference,” Lankford says of the data, “men have a stronger preference for firearms and the gender gap is closer when it comes to using poison, or like, arson, as a murder weapon.”
When asked about any research that has been done as to why men prefer to use firearms, Lankford said there was no agreed-upon or confirmed answer. “There's been speculation that, for example, women don't like to see the bloody damaged body, or even to envision themselves being defaced if they were discovered after a suicide. Whereas men aren't bothered by that or, and in some cases, are even attracted to this idea of blowing things away.”
Lankford added that in the victim-offender relationship, men are more likely to commit murder involving victims who are strangers. “The gender gap's a little closer when it comes to women killing people who they have a closer connection to, like family, an intimate partner, someone else they're closely connected to,” Lankford said.
He said that in some school shootings, there has been a close connection that involves a fellow student or teacher they had a grudge or conflict with. In the case of the Madison shooting, “Everyone was targeted in this incident. And everyone was put in equal danger," Barnes told reporters Tuesday.
“But then there are other cases where especially male shooters just view the victims almost as a symbolic enemy, and/or they kill victims and they don't think about them as personal enemies, but rather are using them to become famous, as a means to an end,” Lankford explained.
Warning signs usually precede a school shooting, experts say
Mass shooting perpetrators often display some sort of warning signs before they commit the acts of violence. “In fact, in 32 percent of the mass shootings in which four or more people were killed, a shooter exhibited at least one warning sign before the shooting,” according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for stricter gun laws.
Barnes said the 15-year-old female shooter “was obviously very troubled” in an interview with CBS Mornings on Tuesday. “There's usually some type of warning signs that we all may have missed and so we have to understand that we have to come together as a community. We have to wrap our arms around our children and understand what's going on in their lives.”
Schildkraut told Yahoo News that she is working on a project funded by the Department of Homeland Security to look at the warning signs, behaviors and communications of individuals that perpetuate these types of shootings.
“Regardless of their gender or sex identity, these are individuals who are presenting considerable warning signs before the shooting happens that one or more persons is usually privy to,” Schildkraut explained.
“What our project is doing is analyzing that total threat environment and creating public awareness training for K to 12 schools, colleges and universities and the general public to try and help to break down that bystander effect, get more people to intervene and hopefully prevent these tragedies from occurring,” she said.
