A suspect opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, on Monday, killing two people and wounding six others before dying of what police believe was a gunshot wound.

According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, it is one of more than 320 shootings that have occurred on school grounds this year alone.

While school shootings are common in the United States, this one is unusual because of the identity of the alleged perpetrator: Authorities have identified her as a 15-year-old girl.

Data shows that female shooters — in schools and in general — are relatively rare.

An FBI investigation into active shooter incidents from 2000 to 2019 found that of the 345 total perpetrators, 332 were men and only 13 were women.

Similar statistics support mass shootings, which the FBI defines as any incident in which at least four people are murdered with a weapon (so Monday doesn’t meet that criteria).

According to a Justice Department database, a staggering 97.7% of perpetrators of mass shootings between 1966 and 2019 were male.

The nonprofit Violence Prevention Project says that of the 200 shooters involved in mass shootings between 1999 and 2024, only four identified as female and one as transgender – referring to the attacker in the shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville in 2023.

What makes female shooters rare – and different

Jillian Peterson, co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project, forensic psychologist and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University, says many school shooters “see themselves” in the perpetrators of other tragedies who have been men in the past. Only nine female students have committed a school shooting since 1999, according to the school’s analysis Washington Post.

“A lot of school shooters study Columbine, for example,” Peterson told NPR in 2021. “Other university shooters are studying the Virginia Tech shooting. And they’re really using these previous shootings as a blueprint for their own.”

More broadly, experts say, as NPR has reported over the years, men are more likely than women to blame others (rather than their own shortcomings), which can translate into anger and hostility.

And men tend to prefer shooting guns than women, with studies showing they are more likely to choose a knife when using violence.

Researchers Jason Silva and Margaret Schmul examined the demographics, motivations and incidents of female shooters between 1979 and 2019 for an article published in Journal of Mass Violence Research in 2021.

They say existing studies attribute mass shootings of men to “some form of male aggrieved entitlement or a crisis of masculinity,” often “motivated by grievances toward women.”

In contrast, they found that female mass shooters are not motivated by relationship disputes, but often target workplaces and are more likely to work as a couple, “particularly when engaging in ideologically motivated attacks.”

“Just as there are different trends and patterns in homicide among women, it is important for research to also distinguish and understand female mass shooters,” they write.

Examples of female shooters in recent US history

Shootings by female suspects have made headlines in recent years, particularly in the last decade.

In 2006, a former U.S. Postal Service employee fatally shot six people at a postal facility in Goleta, California, before taking her own life. Authorities said documents later found in the home of the woman, who had struggled with mental illness, suggested she believed she was being threatened by a conspiracy involving postal workers.

In 2018, a woman with an apparent grudge against YouTube opened fire at the company’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, wounding several people and fatally shooting herself.

That same year, a temporary worker at a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland, fatally shot three people and then fatally shot himself. While authorities and some friends initially identified the perpetrator as female, some media outlets later reported that she had begun identifying as transgender in the years before the shooting.

Women have also been part of couples that committed shootings, such as in the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, and the 2019 shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey

A young girl was behind the 1979 school shooting that inspired a hit song

An infamous school shooting committed by a woman occurred in January 1979, when 16-year-old Brenda Spencer shot from the window of her San Diego home at children arriving at the elementary school across the street.

Nine children and two adults – the school principal and the caretaker – were killed in the attack.

Steve Wiegand, a reporter at the San Diego Evening Tribunebegan randomly calling homes near Grover Cleveland Elementary School to talk to potential eyewitnesses. He first contacted Spencer, and after talking for a while, he realized that the shots had come from her house. Wiegand asked why she did that.

“She said, ‘Because I just don’t like Mondays. Do you like Monday? You know, it just makes the day more lively,'” he recalls.

On the other side of the country, Bob Geldof, the lead singer of the Irish new wave band Boomtown Rats, was being interviewed on a radio station in Atlanta when he saw news of the incident come over the wires.

Impressed by Spencer’s phrasing, he went back to his hotel room and wrote “I Don’t Like Mondays.” Released in July 1979, the song spent four weeks at the top of the UK singles chart.

Spencer, on the other hand, was charged as an adult, pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to life in prison.

She will be eligible for parole in 2025, and California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records show a hearing is scheduled for February.