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The 28-year-old woman who allegedly opened fire at a private school in Nashville, Tennessee is just the fifth female school mass shooter in history.
Police say the killer – who has not yet been named – killed three kids and three adults before she was shot dead by police. Her identity has not yet been confirmed.
Females make up just about 2 percent of both mass shootings and school shootings in the United States, according to data compiled by The Violence Project, which maintains a database of school shootings in which more than 1 person was shot or a person came to school heavily armed with the intention of firing indiscriminately.
It found that females committed just four school shootings out of 147 recorded.
The first took place in 1979 when 16-year-old Brenda Spencer shot dead her principal and another members of staff at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. Asked why she killed, Spencer infamously told a reporter: ‘I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day,’ which inspired Bob Geldof to write the BoomTown Rats hit record.
The first of these female shooters carried out her attack that year, claiming she just does not like Mondays. Brenda Spencer, a 16-year-old who carried out an attack on Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. She killed the school’s principal and a custodian, and wounded eight children and a police officer
Students are evacuated from The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday after a female shooter killed three kids and two adults
The attack also left eight children and a police officer injured.
Authorities said at the time she ‘fired shots from her house across the street from the school’.
Spencer pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and was sentenced to life in prison with a chance of parole after 25 years.
Other female school shooters include Teah Wimberly, who was just 15-years-old when she fatally shot Amanda Collette, also 15, at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 2008, and Latina Williams, 23, who killed two students in a Louisiana Technical College classroom before killing herself.
Baton Rouge police said in the aftermath that Williams had been exhibiting signs of ‘paranoia and losing touch with reality,’ according to FOX News.
More recently, a sixth-grade girl opened fire at an Idaho middle school in 2021.
A father carries his son out of The Covenant School in Nashville after a shooter killed three students and two staff members before being shot dead
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Researchers have also found that shooters who target bigger groups or schools tend to study past perpetrators, who are more likely to be male.
‘They see themselves in some of these other shooters,’ said Violence Project President Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and professor at Hamline University in Minnesota.
Boys in general tend to externalize anger and sadness against other people, whereas girls are more likely to internalize those emotions and have higher rates of depression and anxiety, Peterson said.
The Idaho girl is also younger than most school shooters, who are more often in high school.
The Violence Project’s database shows about 18 percent of school shootings were at middle schools, though most of those were among older teenagers. Only a handful involved sixth-grade students, Peterson said.
Two recent studies by the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center offer insight into common characteristics between many kids who plan or carry out school shootings. The students were often badly bullied, suffered from depression with stress at home and exhibited behavior that worried others. They were often absent from school before the attack.
Most attackers who carried out deadly school shootings were male; seven were female, according to the studies. Researchers said 63% of the attackers were white, 15 percent were black, 5 percent Hispanic, 2 percent were American Indian or Alaska Native, 10 percent were of two or more races, and 5 percent were undetermined.
School shootings have become increasingly common in the U.S. over the past two decades, but they remain relatively rare in Idaho. In 1999, a student at a high school in the community of Notus, west of Boise, fired a shotgun several times. No one was struck by the gunfire, but one student was injured by ricocheting debris from the first shell.
In 1989, a student at Rigby Junior High pulled a gun, threatened a teacher and students, and took a 14-year-old girl hostage. Police safely rescued the hostage from a nearby church about an hour later and took the teen into custody. No one was shot in that incident.
In 2016, Idaho lawmakers passed a bill that allowed most people to carry concealed weapons without a permit. But that right doesn’t extend to schools, courthouses or correctional facilities.
Earlier this year, Rep. Chad Christensen, a Republican from Ammon — just 15 miles south of Rigby — pushed for legislation that would allow school district employees with enhanced concealed weapons permits to carry guns on school property. The bill passed the House but didn’t move forward in a Senate committee. Similar legislation was rejected in 2019 and 2020.
In a Facebook post made roughly two hours after the Rigby Middle School shooting, Christensen said the state needed to do more to stop shootings, and he criticized those who pushed against his concealed weapons bill.
‘For all of those that have stood in the way of my school carry bill, shame on you. You know who you are!’ Christensen wrote.
The Idaho chapters of Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action — both part of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group — said forcing more guns into schools isn’t the solution.
‘The idea that we should be bringing more guns into our schools after what happened today is ridiculous,’ Idaho Moms Demand Action volunteer Theresa Kaufmann said in a prepared statement on Thursday. ‘We need our lawmakers to stop putting children, teachers and the entire state in danger by weakening our already weak gun laws.’
