A 15-year-old girl opened fire at an elementary school in the US state of Wisconsin on Monday, killing a teacher and a student and wounding six others at the school she attended, police said.
The suspect, Natalie Rupnow, who went by Samantha, is also dead, after police say she died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
This incident occurred at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s been reported that the shooting took place just before 11 a.m. in a study hall comprising mixed ages and grades.
A second grade teacher made the 911 call, according to police on Tuesday, who had previously stated it was a student who alerted authorities to the situation.
Officials are trying to determine Rupnow’s motive, which appears to be a combination of factors.
In a news conference on Tuesday, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said police were talking to students to determine if bullying was one of the factors.
“Everyone was targeted in this incident and everyone was put in equal danger,” Barnes said.
In the wake of Monday’s shooting, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are urging elected officials to combat gun violence.
“Our nation mourns for those who were killed, and we pray for the recovery of those who are injured and for the entire community,” Harris said.
“We as a nation must renew our commitment to end the horror of gun violence, both mass shootings and everyday gun violence that touches so many communities in our nation.”
This year alone, more than 320 shootings have taken place on US school grounds, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. This is also the 488th mass shooting that’s taken place in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Female mass shooters
While school shootings aren’t rare in the US, data shows that female shooters are relatively rare.
Only nine female students have committed a school shooting since 1999, according to an analysis by the Washington Post.
An FBI review of active-shooter incidents from 2000 to 2019 found that of the 345 total perpetrators, 332 were men and just 13 were women.
According to the Justice Department database, a staggering 97.7 per cent of perpetrators of mass shootings from 1966 to 2019 were male. And between 1999 to 2024, the nonprofit Violence Prevention Project says that out of the 200 shooters involved in mass shootings, only four identified as female and one as transgender.
James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist who has been studying mass killings for more than 40 years, said that when it comes to mass killings perpetrated by women, most of the cases involve family and take a different approach to violence than men.
“Women tend to use violence as a self-defense mechanism to deal with threats that they feel against them,” Fox says. “Men oftentimes use violence as an offensive weapon — to establish control.”
Researchers Jason Silva and Margaret Schmuhl explored the demographics, motivations and incidents of female shooters between 1979 and 2019 for an article published in the Journal of Mass Violence Research in 2021.
They said existing studies attribute male mass shootings to a sense of entitlement or “crisis of masculinity”, whereas female mass shooters often target workplaces and are more likely to work as part of a pair.
“Just as women have exhibited distinct trends and patterns in homicide offending … it is important for research to also distinguish and understand female mass shooters,” Silva and Schmuhl wrote.