Police in Wisconsin have identified 15-year-old student Natalie Rupnow as the shooter who killed a classmate and teacher, then died of apparent gun shot wounds at a Christian school in the city of Madison on Monday.
If Rupnow carried out the shooting, as police say she did, she would be one of the rare female perpetrators of a school shooting in recent decades. Male gunmen committ the overwhelming majority of such attacks.
Including the Madison shooting, just nine female students have carried out a school shooting since 1999, according to a Washington Post database.
Advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety finds a similar figure, with less than 5 percent of female shooters across 544 school shooting incidents over the last 11 years .
That tracks with the statistics for mass shootings overall.
Of the 197 shooting incidents in the Violence Prevention Project database of mass shootings since 1966, 192 of the shooters were male, 4 were female, and 1 was transgender. White men made up the majority of perpetrators, according to the database.
After the Madison shooting, right-wing commentators quickly spread unverified claims the shooter was transgender, often alongside wider attacks on transgender people overall.
Madison police called on the public to disregard such comments.
“I dont think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she, or he, or they may have wanted to identify,” Chief Shon Barnes said during a Monday evening press conference. “I wish people would kind of leave their own personal biases out of this. We have people who have yet another school shooting in Madison. That’s where my focus will be for the very near future.”
A related phenomenon took place last year after the 2023 Nashville shooting at a Christian school, where police described the gunman as transgender, though the shooter’s social media profile suggested they had identified as male in the months before the incident.
Commentators argued people with anti-LGBTQ+ views seize on mass shootings to spread their underlying prejudices.
“When hundreds of white men commit mass shootings, it’s a ‘societal problem,’ but when one trans person commits a mass shooting, it’s a ‘trans problem,’” Alejandra Caraballo, a trans activist and clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s Cyberlaw Clinic, wrote after the Nashville shooting. “The actual problem is that this country is unable to do anything at all to stop gun violence.”
