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“Ninety-five percent of mass shootings are committed by men,” says James Alan Fox in reference to a shooting by a 15-year-old female that claimed two lives.
A 15-year-old female shot and killed two people — a fellow student and a teacher — on Monday at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. An additional six people were injured, including two students who are in critical condition.
Such cases involving female mass shooters are extremely rare, says James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist who has been studying mass killings for more than 40 years.
“Ninety-five percent of mass shootings are committed by men,” says Fox, a research professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern. “The overall majority of violent crimes — particularly homicide and gun homicide — are committed by men.”
Police were investigating the motive of the shooter, identified as Natalie Rupnow, who was found dead when police arrived on campus Monday morning.
Fox’s research on mass killings provides perspective on the rarity of violence perpetrated by women.
“Since 2006 there have been 589 mass shooters who killed at least four victims,” says Fox, who presides over the Associated Press/USA TODAY/Northeastern University Mass Killings Database, the most extensive data source on the subject. “Of those shooters, 33 were women.”
Fox adds: “Most of the female-perpetrated cases involved family.”
Fox says his research has found that men and women take different approaches to violence.
“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.”
A Washington Post analysis found that Rupnow appears to be the ninth female student to commit a school shooting since the 1999 killings at Columbine High School. Four percent of school shooters are female, according to the Post database, which tracks only shootings that occur during the school day on K-12 campuses in which students are present.
That distinction is crucial, Fox says.
“You hear numbers in the news media that there have been 83 school shootings this year,” Fox says. “But most of those shootings don’t involve students or occur inside the school. A large number of those shootings on school property involve non-students as perpetrators and as victims. They involve shootings in the evenings and weekends when school is not in session, and they also involve accidental discharge of firearms.”
Fox says it is important for students and parents to recognize that shootings like the tragedy in Madison — an event targeting students during classroom hours — are tragic yet rare.
“This year five students have been fatally shot by an assailant while inside school, and that’s out of 50 million enrolled in K-12 schools,” Fox says. “Shootings on school parking lots and athletic fields no matter the time of day shouldn’t be discounted, but they are unrelated to such measures as lockdown drills and armed school personnel.
“I’m not trying to minimize the horror that two students were killed and others were injured seriously in the latest incident,” Fox says. “The average number of K-12 students who are killed in school by an assailant with a gun is between six and seven per year. That is too many, obviously.”
Fox says problems are caused by active-shooter drills at schools.
“When we overemphasize the risk of school shootings and have kids going through active-shooter drills, we increase the amount of fear that kids feel because we’re sending the message to kids that: ‘You’ve got a bullseye in the back. We wouldn’t be doing this if you weren’t in danger,’” Fox says.
“We also normalize the whole act of shootings in school, so that some kid who is angry with his or her teacher or peers sees that this is what others do — take a gun to school and shoot them. By continuously obsessing over school shootings and repeatedly doing trainings, it keeps the idea alive in the minds of kids.”
Violent crime overall in the U.S. has declined in 2024, Fox says.
“Homicide rates and mass shootings are down this year,” he says. “But the media in general has not picked up on it.”