A 28-year-old Nashville woman has been identified as the shooter who killed three children and three adults at The Covenant School in Tennessee on Monday.
The shooter was armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun when she entered the building. She was killed by police at the school within 15 minutes of the first 911 call reporting that she had opened fire.
When police revealed that the shooter was a woman, many of the reporters gathered at the news conference in Nashville were audibly surprised, and with good reason.
Of the more than 100 mass shootings that have happened in the United States in the last four decades, the vast majority have been carried out by men.
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How Many Mass Shooters Have Been Female?
Of the 141 U.S. mass killings since 1982, only six were carried out by women, according to data from Mother Jones. Two of those incidents saw women acting in partnership with a man.
NBC defines a mass shooting as an attack where three or more people were killed in the same incident, not including the shooter.
What Mass Shootings Were Carried Out by Women?
The first mass killing by a woman since 1982 took place on Jan. 30, 2006, when former postal worker Jennifer San Marco, 44, shot and killed a former neighbor before going on a suicidal rampage at a mail processing plant in Santa Barbara, Calif., where she killed six others.
In February 2014, Cherie Lash Rhoades, 44, shot six people at the Cedarville Rancheria Tribal Office and Community Center, killing four and wounding two.
Snochia Moseley, 26, killed three people in September 2018 after opening fire at a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, Md. Moseley was a temporary employee at the facility.
Monday's shooting at The Covenant School was the fourth carried out by only one woman over the last 41 years.
Tashfeen Malik and Francine Graham also carried out mass shootings with male partners. Malik, 27, and Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, killed 14 and injured more at a holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif., on Dec. 2, 2015.
Graham, 50, and David N. Anderson, 47, killed three people inside a kosher grocery store and a police officer in Jersey City, N.J., on Dec. 10, 2019.
The percentage of attacks carried out by women is also small when looking at incidents beyond mass killings.
The Secret Service analyzed 173 targeted attacks from 2016 to 2020 and found that 172 of the 180 attackers (95.6%) were male. Three more were transgender, assigned female at birth but known to identify as male at the time of their attacks.
