On Tuesday, a 39-year-old woman opened fire at YouTube headquarters, injuring three people, before apparently killing herself. Data from an FBI study shows that it is very rare for women to carry out such shootings. Its survey of active shooter incidents in the United States—defined as “an individual engaging in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area”—found that nine of the 220 incidents, about four percent, had female shooters, reports CNN. The women in these shootings usually used handguns and opened fire inside colleges, businesses, or their current or former workplace, the FBI study said. Adam Lankford, criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama told CNN that there are fewer female shooters when it comes to firearm homicides in general. FBI data from 2016 shows that 7.6 percent of murder offenders that year were women.
“Men commit the overwhelming majority of mass shootings for basically the same reasons they commit most violent crimes,” Dewey G. Cornell, a licensed forensic clinical psychologist and director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project at the University of Virginia, told CNN. “Men tend to be more violent than women because of a complex interaction of evolutionary and psycho-social factors. Men tend to be more aggressive and less inhibited by empathy, and men in distress seem to be less willing to turn to others for help.”
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