What Do We Make of a Female Active Shooter?
The biggest surprise about Tuesday’s shooting at YouTube wasn’t the fact that there was a shooting. Americans are horribly used to the ritual of these events by now: the sick feeling of waiting for the body count, the time it takes for biographical information to trickle out and a motive to be set forth, the think pieces advocating for fewer guns or more guns, excoriating white male rage or toxic masculinity. But one part of the script was upended in Tuesday’s shooting: The person holding the gun was a woman.
“Mass murder is typically a profoundly male act,” write the criminology professors Eric Madfis and Jeffrey W. Cohen in a paper published in . The statistics leave no room for doubt: Women are far less likely to commit any sort of murder, much less mass murder. According to 93.4 percent
