Natalie Rupnow, girl accused of Wisconsin school deaths, is one of few female mass shooting suspects
The fatal shooting of a student and a teacher at a private Christian school in Wisconsin was laden with shock, even for a nation dulled by the horror of repeated school massacres.
The fatal shooting of a student and a teacher at a private Christian school in Wisconsin on Monday was laden with shock, even for a nation dulled by the horror of repeated school massacres.
The suspect, Natalie Rupnow, who police say killed herself during the rampage, was just 15 — but even more surprisingly, she was a girl. Mass shootings carried out by females are vanishingly rare.
Of the 2,000-plus mass shootings since 2013 in which a perpetrator’s gender was known, fewer than 60 involved female assailants, according to an NBC News analysis of Gun Violence Archive data. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that tracks gun violence, defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which four or more people are shot, not including the shooter. While the public often thinks of mass shootings as active shooter events in public places like schools, those are a small subset of such shootings, which can also include domestic and drive-by attacks.
In 2006, 44-year-old postal worker Jennifer Sanmarco killed seven people and then herself at a Santa Barbara postal facility, inspired by what she believed was a conspiracy against her. Despite a long history of mental illness — she had been placed on retirement disability leave for psychological reasons in 2003 — she was able to buy a 9 mm Smith & Wesson handgun with no problem after a routine background check, law enforcement officials said.
In 2014, former tribal chairwoman Cherie Lash Rhoades, then 44, opened fire and killed four people and critically injured two others at Cedarville Rancheria Tribal Office in the remote Northern California town of Alturas. The shooting took place during a hearing over her planned eviction from a property on tribal lands.
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