Only the fifth female mass shooter in US history, a 28-year-old woman who carried out a deadly terror attack at a private Christian primary school in Nashville on Monday, according to data.
Three children and three adults were killed by the shooter, who authorities identified as local white lady Audrey Hale, when she stormed The Covenant School armed with two assault-style rifles and a pistol.
Police then shot and killed her following an approximately 14-minute shooting spree.
The Violence Project database shows that only 2% of mass shooters nationwide are female.
Only four of the 191 mass shooters the database has documented since 1966—which does not yet include the massacre in Nashville—are female.
The data reveals that two of the four women had collaborated with a male gunman.
According to the national database of The Violence Project, a mass shooting is one that results in four or more fatalities.
Brenda Spencer, one of the more well-known female mass shooters, is not included in the database.
Spencer started shooting at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego in January 1979 when he was 16 years old.
Eight children were hurt in the incident, while the principal and the custodian of the school died.
When asked why she committed the atrocity, Spencer, who is still imprisoned in California, famously said, “I don’t like Mondays. This brightens the day.
Some prominent female mass murderers have made headlines in more recent years, like Nasim Aghdam, a gunman on YouTube.
In 2018, Aghdam allegedly broke into the business’s headquarters in the San Francisco area after growing angry with the video platform, according to the authorities.
Before shooting herself, she injured three other people.
In 2015, 14 people were killed and 17 others were injured when Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Farook opened fire at a social services centre in San Bernardino, California.
Both suspects were killed in a shootout with police that followed.
In 2006, Jennifer San Marco shot and killed six postal workers at a Goleta, California, sorting facility where she had previously worked. San Marco had also killed a former neighbour earlier that day with a gun.
According to experts, there are several explanations for why men are more likely to commit acts of mass violence.
Professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Jonathan Metzl made the case that men are more likely to use violence because they have higher testosterone levels, tend to own more firearms than women, and are raised to do so.
Nevertheless, according to other data provided by the FBI, only one of the 61 mass shootings that occurred in 2021 were carried out by a woman.
