The 15-year-old girl said seven victims were shotTwo dead, Monday’s attack on a Christian school in Wisconsin marks the rare occurrence of an all-female school shooting, according to data from the FBI and US Secret Service.
Police identified the suspect in the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison as Natalie Rupnow, a student at the school who went by the name Samantha.
After allegedly killing a teacher and a classmate and injuring five others, including two students in critical condition, Rupnow died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to police.
“It’s very sad but rare for a school shooting to be a female,” said Don Mihal, a retired Secret Service special agent and ABC News contributor. “Historically, and research shows, it’s usually a white male or former student who ends up committing these acts of violence in schools.”
The US Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) analyzed 41 incidents targeted school violence Incidents between 2008 and 2017, including those in which no one was injured, found that 83% of suspects were male and 17% were female.
A police officer stands guard outside Abundant Life Christian School on December 16, 2024 in Madison, Wisconsin.
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another analyze The FBI found that of the 49 shooters involved in 48 active shootings in the United States in 2023, 98% were men.
The perpetrators of school shootings in 2023 included a 28-year-old Audrey Halekilled three students and three staff members at Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, where authorities said he had once been a student. Hale had seven firearms, including three used in the private school shooting, according to police. Officials said Hale was being treated for an unspecified emotional disorder. Hale was killed at the scene by the two officers.
A police spokeswoman told ABC News that Hale was assigned female at birth and pointed to a social media account linked to Hale, which she used pronouns.
An FBI review Of the 345 suspects involved in 333 active shooting incidents between 2000 and 2019, including 62 in educational settings, 332 were male and 13 were female.
The Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks all shootings in the United States, found that 157 of the 805 school shooting incidents since 2012 involved female “participants.”
The National Center for Education Statistics also found that between 2000 and 2022, 94% of active shooters in educational settings were male.
Madison police investigators have not yet suggested a motive for Monday’s school shooting, or whether the victims were specifically targeted.
The suspect’s parents are cooperating with the investigation, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes told ABC News.
Pre-K through 12th grade students attend a Christian school. Police said the shooting took place “in a classroom of a classroom full of students from multiple grade levels.”
The police have not yet said where the suspect got the gun used in the shooting.
“In almost all of these situations, the students who have access to guns have generally gotten access to them from their parents, from their family,” Mihal said.
Mihalek said she was one of the few female active shooters in recent years that she could remember Portia Odufuwathen 37, opened fire at Love Field Airport in Dallas in 2022 before being shot and wounded by police. No one else was injured in the shooting and in 2023 Odufuwa was found not guilty by reason of insanity on a charge of aggravated assault.
Other female shooters include Jennifer San Marco, a former US Postal Service employee who was shot dead at a mail processing and distribution center near Santa Barbara, Calif., in January 2006, after police say she killed six people after killing her neighbor. San Marco died by suicide.
in 2015, Tashfeen MalikThe 29-year-old, and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, both of whom had pledged allegiance to ISIS, shot and killed 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015. Malik and Farook were killed in a shootout with the police.
Mihalek said investigators are likely combing the Wisconsin school shooting suspect’s social media trail as they look for a motive.
“I think there are a lot of things in social media that are creating these mental health crises in kids, especially girls,” Mihal said. “Now, instead of finding your self-worth in good grades, doing well on a sports team, playing a musical instrument well, teachers and parents telling you ‘good job,’ how many likes you have, how many people are watching your feed.”
Mihal said many girls have been victims of online bullying.
“It’s tearing the fabric of a child and many don’t know how to handle it, because at these young ages they’re not really able to understand how to handle a bullying incident like this,” Mihal said. “In all schools, the key is to internalize the behaviors and ways of violence. Critical behaviors that put children on the path to violence are social stress and complaints. If you’re being cyberbullied and told by a lot of people that you’re not good online, that can easily turn into a complaint.”
ABC News’ Jack Date and Briana Stewart contributed to this report.
