Girl accused in Wisconsin school deaths joins short list of female mass shooting suspects

The fatal shooting of a student and a teacher at a private Christian school in Wisconsin on Monday was laden with shock, even for a nation dulled by the horror of repeated school massacres.

The suspect, Natalie Rupnow, who police say killed herself during the rampage, was just 15 — but even more surprisingly, she was a girl. Mass shootings carried out by females are vanishingly rare.

Of the 2,000-plus mass shootings since 2013 in which a perpetrator’s gender was known, fewer than 60 involved female assailants, according to an NBC News analysis of Gun Violence Archive data. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that tracks gun violence, defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which four or more people are shot, not including the shooter. While the public often thinks of mass shootings as active shooter events in public places like schools, those are a small subset of such shootings, which can also include domestic and drive-by attacks.

In 2006, 44-year-old postal worker Jennifer Sanmarco killed seven people and then herself at a Santa Barbara postal facility, inspired by what she believed was a conspiracy against her. Despite a long history of mental illness — she had been placed on retirement disability leave for psychological reasons in 2003 — she was able to buy a 9 mm Smith & Wesson handgun with no problem after a routine background check, law enforcement officials said.

In 2014, former tribal chairwoman Cherie Lash Rhoades, then 44, opened fire and killed four people and critically injured two others at Cedarville Rancheria Tribal Office in the remote Northern California town of Alturas. The shooting took place during a hearing over her planned eviction from a property on tribal lands.

The dead included Rhoades’ 50-year-old brother, Rurik Davies, 30-year-old nephew Glenn Calonicco and 19-year-old niece Angel Penn, who was holding her newborn baby when she was shot. The infant was unharmed, a court heard. 

Rhoades was sentenced to death in 2017 and remains one of the fewer than 50 women on death row.

Rite Aid distribution center worker Snochia Moseley, 26, killed three people and injured three others at her place of work in Aberdeen, Maryland, before killing herself in 2018. She had a history of mental illness but her 9 mm handgun was legally owned.

Another shooting was carried out by 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who killed six people including three children at a Christian school in Nashville last year and was shot dead by responding police officers. Police later stated that Hale identified as transgender and used he/him pronouns.

In 2018, Nasim Aghdam, 38, from San Diego, opened fire at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California.

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The American Iranian injured three people, one of them critically, before taking her own life.

Her bewildered family said she had become angry with the video platform for policies that she believed were an attempt to “discriminate” against her, reduce views for her animal rights videos and stop her from earning money from them.

She bought the Smith & Wesson 9 mm semiautomatic handgun legally, police said.

A ‘profoundly masculine act’

Women’s rights campaigners say the overwhelming representation of men as the perpetrators in violent shootings is inextricably linked to statistics showing the victims to be typically women.

A 2019 study in the California Law Review called mass shootings a “profoundly masculine act” and pointed out that many of the victims of violent and fatal crime in the U.S. are women and are linked to a wider pattern of domestic violence and ideological misogyny.

“Even when mass shootings involve neighbors, strangers, and police, women and children overwhelmingly pay the price,” the study said.

The study cited research from the campaign group Everytown for Gun Safety that showed that of the 57% of mass shootings involving an intimate partner or other family member, 64% of the victims were women and children.