YouTube Shooter Was A She: Brief History Of Female Mass Shooters

It’s not unheard of for women to unleash a spray of bullets, as Nasim Najafi Aghdam is accused of doing Tuesday at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California, but the phenomenon is so rare it hasn’t been studied.

In recent years, there are only a handful of mass shootings involving women. Experts in human behavior say women are violent at much lower rates than men, and mass shootings are overwhelmingly a male phenomenon, according to Live Science.

“There aren’t enough cases” to do an in-depth study, James Garbarino, a psychologist at Loyola University Chicago, said in an interview with Live Science after Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, opened fire at a holiday party inside the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, in 2015. Fourteen people were killed and another 20 were wounded.

What makes the YouTube shooting so rare is that women account for only 10 percent to 13 percent of homicides in the United States, Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor and author of “The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers,” told Live Science.

And when they do kill, women are much less likely to use a gun. Their weapons of choice are usually poison (40 percent) or fire (20 percent), Lankford said. Only 8 percent of gun-related homicides are committed by females.

And the gender gap isn’t just an American phenomenon, but one seen in cultures around the world, Garbarino said.

There are several theories about why men are more likely than women to commit mass shootings, but the most likely one is evolutionary, Live Science reported.

Below is a timeline of the very brief history of mass shootings committed by women:

Lead photo via Shutterstock