Wisconsin shooting: How rare are female school shooters as US town reels from latest tragedy?

It was a tragedy immortalised in a hit by The Boomtown Rats when a teenager opened fire on an elementary school in San Diego in 1979.

Yet the case of Brenda Spencer - who was 17 when she carried out a shooting spree, citing the sole reason “I don’t Like Mondays” that became the title of the song - remains rare.

Spencer killed the school principal and injured eight more people in that attack - the vast majority of them children. But of hundreds of mass shootings which have occurred in the US since the one carried out by Spencer, just a handful have ever been perpetrated by women or girls.

On Monday, another girl, aged just 15, opened fire on the Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin. Shooter Natalie Rupnow, who also went by the name of Samantha, was found dead at the scene.

A teenage victim and a teacher were killed. Six other students were hurt in the attack, including two who suffered life-threatening injuries.

Students from Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, are escorted to a city bus where they will reunited with their parents after a school shooting. | Getty Images

No motive for Ms Rupnow’s attack, which was first called in to emergency services by a second grade student, has yet been identified. Ms Rupnow was a pupil at the school and was believed to have attended as normal on the day of the shooting before opening fire.

There are different definitions of shootings, making it difficult to ascertain exactly how many women and girls have been involved in mass public attacks. However, it is universally acknowledged the figures are tiny compared to the number of males involved in such incidents.

One measure, from website Statista, found that since 1982, 145 mass shootings - identified here as a single attack in a public place where four or more people were killed - have been carried out in the United States by male shooters, with just four carried out by women.

Another recent study from the FBI found of the 49 active shooter incidents - defined as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area - recorded in 2023, 48 were carried out by men, with the final perpetrator identifying as both female and transgender male.

Figures from advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety reveal women make up less than 5 per cent of 544 school shooting incidents which have occurred in the US over the past 11 years.

In 2018, Nasim Najafi Aghdam, a female shooter, opened fire on the headquarters of YouTube in San Fransisco, killing one person and injuring two more, before turning the gun on herself.

Meanwhile, in 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik massacred 14 people at a party in San Bernardino, California, hosted by the local health department, where Mr Farook had worked.

Nine years earlier, Jennifer San Marco killed six employees at her former workplace, a postal distribution centre in California, after killing someone who had previously been a neighbour.

The same FBI report identified the vast majority of active shooter incidents took place - like the school shooting carried out by Spencer 45 years ago - on a Monday, with the day accounting for almost a quarter of the incidents last year.