When Girls Shoot Up Schools

Can we finally stop minimizing female violence?

Police have not so far said very much about what motivated and precipitated the deadly shooting rampage by 15-year-old Natalie (Samantha) Rupnow at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. Just before 11 am on December 16, Rupnow used a handgun to open fire on students in a study hall, killing a 14-year-old girl and a substitute teacher, and injuring six others, some critically. She then shot herself.

Based on the 6-page statement or ‘manifesto’ (still unverified) released by the shooter’s friend and posted by X-user Anna Slatz, media reports have mentioned white supremacist ideology, Rupnow’s parents’ rocky relationships, experiences of bullying and isolation, and a generalized hatred of other people. For some hours after the shooting, a fake manifesto circulated in which the shooter claimed to have been influenced by radical feminism; the fact that some men’s rights advocates believed it to be authentic has caused hilarity.

But the purportedly real statement, a banal screed characterized by self-pity and self-aggrandizement, doesn’t tell us much about the teen who thought killing children would be a gutsy personal finale. The statement makes no claims of physical or sexual abuse, or even of unbearable misery and persecution: here is a girl like many others, it seems, who hated her parents and said people were “scum.”

Like many acts of female violence, Rupnow’s rampage doesn’t fit common narratives about girls’ aggression, and pundits and authorities have scrambled in the days following to circumvent any politically-incorrect judgements.

One taboo was made evident in the response by Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes, who denounced rumors that the shooter was transgender. “I don’t think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they may have wanted to identify,” he is reported to have said, adding that he was “unaware of the suspect’s gender identity.” He added definitively, “And I wish people would kind of leave their own personal biases out of this.”

It was a strange response for a police chief, in which he admitted that he didn’t know if transgender identity was relevant but rebuked anyone who asked if it was. Such “personal biases” were unacceptable, even though it was only a year and a half ago that another Christian school, this time in Nashville, was targeted by Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old former student and F-M trans who killed three adults and three nine-year-old students in an act believed by some to have been a hate crime against Christians. It is not particularly odd to wonder if trans rage might have played a role this time.

It's also notable that even as he denied that gender identity was a factor in the murders, Chief Barnes was careful to use a variety of pronouns in referring to the dead shooter, as if to show respect for her possible preference. Why so much deference? It’s impossible to imagine, in a different context, Chief Barnes rebuking anyone who asked if a shooter was a men’s rights advocate, or going out of his way to affirm the legitimacy of anti-feminist ideology. Even concerning hypotheticals, then, only permissible thoughts are to be entertained.

But the main narrative has been about the rarity of teen girls’ violence. Some news items made that part of their lead, as in “A teen girl just committed a school shooting in Wisconsin. That almost never happens.” The Daily Mail asserted that “Only about 3% of all U.S. mass shootings are perpetrated by females, studies show.” The Guardian reassured readers that, “Young women are far less likely than young men to be suspects in school shootings. According to the K-12 school shooting database, as of Tuesday, nine suspects this year were female compared to 249 male suspected shooters.”

Actually, nine in one year, though undeniably far fewer than the number of male shooters, hardly counts as “almost never.” Just one day after Rupnow’s act, a 19-year-old Brazilian girl, Lyedja Yasmin Silva Santos, attempted to open fire on a teacher and classmates at a Brazilian school. (Fortunately, the gun jammed and a male student tackled Santos before she could do more than graze one student with a bullet.)

And why should it matter whether it is statistically rare or not? It was extremely rare in 1989 when Marc Lépine killed 14 young women at L’École Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada. Nothing like it had ever happened before, but that didn’t stop feminist advocates and journalists from turning the incident into a cause célèbre to shame Canadian men and demand government monies for feminist initiatives, messaging, acknowledgements and programs (please see my essay on the extraordinary, long-lived anti-male campaign). To have repeatedly argued in the immediate aftermath how rare was Lépine’s violence would have seemed dismissive, even callously defensive. When girls are the killers, though, the fact of their being female must be hedged around with cautions and denials.

Some news articles about the school shooting went further in the feminist direction, spending paragraphs explaining why mass murder is actually a distinctively male phenomenon. A Reuters news item quoted an academic expert who alleged that while “toxic masculinity” can be a driver in teen boys’ shootings, there is no equivalent toxicity in teen girls. This typical anti-male text is worth quoting at some length:

Historically, there are factors that have led men to commit these shootings,” said Jonathan Metzl, a sociology and psychiatry professor at Vanderbilt University and an expert on gun violence.

Males often have easier access to firearms, and many shooters model themselves after previous attackers, most of whom were men. Some sociologists also view mass shootings as ‘reflective of a pathology of toxic masculinity,’ Metzl said. And, of course, men are more likely to commit violent crimes in general, not just school shootings.

But other factors common to school shooting—bullying, isolation, social media—are not specific to boys. Data also shows an increase in aggression and violence among adolescent girls in recent years, according to Elizabeth Dowdell, a professor of nursing at Villanova University who has studied school shootings.

Keep in mind that the two paragraphs about male violence come in a news item about a deadly shooting by a 15-year-old girl. Perhaps one should be thankful that the article acknowledges any female orientation towards violence at all. Still, it is striking to see it spelled out that boys kill people at least partially because there is something in their masculine nature that makes them prone to it, while girls kill because they are victims of bullying, isolation, and social media.

OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) made the feminist critique even more specific, informing readers that “men are more likely than women to place blame on others (rather than on their own shortcomings), which could translate into anger and hostility” and that existing studies attribute male mass shootings to “some form of male aggrieved entitlement or crisis of masculinity,” often “motivated by grievances with women.”

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Discomfort with female violence remains a profound feature of our societies even when the evidence shows that aggression and violence are not rare in girls and women.

In the first decade of the 21^st century, it was noted with some concern that the so-called gender gap in violent crime had seemed to be closing. A 2008 government study, for example, admitted that arrest rates of girls for assault had increased significantly over the previous decade (according to some studies, by as much as 40.9%). Authorities evaded the issue, however, by alleging that “increases in girls’ arrests for violence may be due more to change in enforcement policies than to actual changes in girls’ behavior.” It was the police who were causing the increase, researchers stressed, not the girls.

What wasn’t acknowledged was that this explanation merely shifted the time frame: girls had been for decades more violent than was being reported, but the violence had not been taken seriously by law enforcement. More recent reports and studies acknowledge that female aggression and violence are not at all rare.

Yet from Lizzie Borden to the first female school shooter, from Aileen Wuornos to Lorena Bobbitt, pundits and social leaders are loathe to focus on female violence as violence. It is often classed, rather, as self-defense or psychosis, as a cry for help or a blow for justice. As a 2005 study stressed repeatedly, “victimization is emerging as a key factor in understanding girls’ [but not boys’] aggression.” A U.S. Department of Justice report (“Violence by Teenage Girls: Trends and Contexts”) put a sympathetic spin on almost all girls’ violence—whether at home, in school, in gangs, or in communities—by explaining it as, variously, “self-defense against sexual harassment,” “defense against or an expression of anger stemming from being sexually and or physically abused,” or as a reaction to “a general sense of hopelessness” or to “lack of opportunities.” And news outlets are far more likely to report on teen girls’ vulnerability and victimhood than on their victimization of others.

In fact, there is no way to know whether the female shooters listed in the K-12 School Shooting Database were primarily victims or aggressors, whether they acted out of hurt or hate. Most killers likely have a mix of precipitating factors. One of the first female school shooters, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer (of “I Don’t Like Mondays” fame), who in 1979 killed two adults, wounded a police officer, and wounded eight children at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, was described by acquaintances as full of defiant anger, railing against police, accusing her parents of neglect and abuse, and promising “something big” that would get her on TV. Like some other such shooters, she seems to have been a disturbed loner who resented that classmates did not recognize her superiority.

On the other hand, Audrey Hale, the Nashville school shooter, doesn’t seem to have given any indication of incipient violence until the day of her rampage. Quiet and reserved, with a talent for drawing and a love of stuffed animals and cats, she seemed to one of her graphic design classmates to possess a “child-like obsession with staying a child.” The voluminous writings and art that she left behind have not been released to the public, so it is difficult to understand the source of her violence.

As for Natalie Rupnow, perhaps psychologists will in time be able to put together a clear profile. She idolized school shooters and wore a black KMFDM band shirt (the same German industrial rock band favored by Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold) as a signal, it seems, of nihilistic defiance. But why? Petite and rather pretty, Rupnow is said to have had an online boyfriend, and she mentioned in her statement that there were “two people I trust, one partially and one I would never doubt.” That’s better than a lot of 15-year-olds can say. In her badly-written and at times incoherent statement (which actually makes rather few references to what she was about to do), she expressed deep contempt for her parents and an emphatic sense that they, and the world, had failed her.

Overall, however, the statement seems to show an ordinarily wretched, not particularly bright, teen rather than a psychotic or abuse survivor: self-regarding (“I am part of the real thought and the real revolution”), disdainful of others (“most people can’t do what I’m going to do”), and taking no responsibility (“it’s truly not my fault though, it never was”). The dominant note sounded is less anguish than a resentful sense of superiority and desire to see others suffer: “Maybe you’ll see me as a weirdo, a freak just as some of you do now but I’m not, I am not like the others, I would never ever want to be like them,” she declared. “I hate how the population thinks, grows, and talks and how they make romance fake. If only some day we could do a public execution, that would be gladly needed. I wouldn’t mind throwing some stones at idiots or even watching from the far back when they get hanged.”

She used the words “filth” and “scum” repeatedly, at times complaining about being picked on, at other times saying she preferred to be alone anyway. Her disgust and sadism are certainly disturbing, but they do not seem at all gendered.

Many teens are angry and unhappy, in love with violence, and not yet capable of empathy or self-regulation. I knew them well, including many girls, when I was growing up. The modern tendency to portray teen girls primarily as sad and abused, rather than also raging and abusive, has always struck me as short-sighted and false to fact. If we are to deal responsibly with teen girl violence, we must begin by being honest about what it is. We should stop excusing some atrocities based on the sex of the perpetrator, finally admitting that in their capacity to do terrible and cruel things, girls and women are not categorically different, or more innocent, than boys and men.