Female school shooter in Nashville is just the FIFTH in history

The 28-year-old woman who allegedly opened fire at a private school in Nashville, Tennessee is just the fifth female school mass shooter in history.

Police say the shooter – who has not yet been named – killed three kids and three adults before being shot dead by police. Her identity has not yet been confirmed, but police said initially they believed she was a teenager before later confirming she was 28. 

Females make up just about 2 percent of both mass shootings and school shootings in the United States, according to data compiled by The Violence Project, which maintains a database of school shootings in which more than 1 person was shot or a person came to school heavily armed with the intention of firing indiscriminately.

It found that females committed just four school shootings out of 147 recorded, going back to 1979.

The first of these female shooters carried out her attack that year, claiming she just does not like Mondays. Brenda Spencer, a 16-year-old who carried out an attack on Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. She killed the school’s principal and a custodian, and wounded eight children and a police officer.

Students are evacuated from The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday after a female shooter killed three kids and two adults 

Authorities said at the time she ‘fired shots from her house across the street from the school’ and reportedly told police she began shooting because ‘I don’t like Mondays.’

That assertion inspired Bob Geldof, of the Irish new wave group The Boomtown Rats, to write and record his number one hit.

Spencer ultimately pleaded guilty to the charges and remains behind bars.

Other female school shooters include Teah Wimberly, who was just 15-years-old when she fatally shot Amanda Collette, also 15, at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 2008, and Latina Williams, 23, who killed two students in a Louisiana Technical College classroom before killing herself.

Baton Rouge police said in the aftermath that Williams had been exhibiting signs of ‘paranoia and losing touch with reality,’ according to FOX News. 

More recently, a sixth-grade girl opened fire at an Idaho middle school in 2021. 

A father carries his son out of The Covenant School in Nashville after a shooter killed three students and two staff members before being shot dead

Experts say school shooters now tend to study past perpetrators before they carry out their crime.

‘They see themselves in some of these other shooters,’ The Violence Project President Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and professor at Hamline University, told the Associated Press in 2021. 

Attempting to explain why females commit fewer shootings, Peterson said males tend to externalize anger and sadness against other people, whereas girls are more likely to internalize those emotions and have higher rates of depression and anxiety.

Two studies by the US Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center also found that school shooters tend to have been bullied, suffered from depression with stress at home and exhibited behavior that worried others ahead of the attack.

They were also often absent from school in the days leading up to the attack in the outskirts of Nashville on Monday.

It remains unclear why the 28-year-old woman opened fire at the Covenant School.