The Nashville shooter who killed 6 people at Covenant School was a woman. Mass shooters are almost always men, experts say.
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- A woman shot and killed three students and three adult staff members at a Nashville school Monday.
- The female suspect was shot and killed by police following the attack at The Covenant School.
- According to the Violence Project, 98% of all mass shooters are men.
A 28-year-old woman opened fire at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday, killing three elementary school students and three adult staff members, according to police.
Police said they received a call about the shooting at 10:13 a.m. local time. The suspect, who has not yet been publicly named, was shot and killed by police at 10:27 a.m., police said.
The suspect was armed with three weapons at the time of the shooting, including two assault rifles and one handgun, police said.
While the suspect falls just over the average age range of mass shooters, it is still incredibly rare for a mass shooter to be a female, according to the Violence Project's mass shooter database.
Dr. Jillian Peterson, a researcher at Hamline University who runs the Violence Project and has compiled a database of every US mass shooting since 1966, previously told Insider that often, mass shootings are carried out by men between the ages of 18 and 25.
The Violence Project database, which has not yet been updated to reflect Monday's mass shooting, reported that 98% of mass public shooters are men.
Of the 191 mass shooters cataloged in the database, only four were women, and two of those four women partnered with a man in the shooting.
According to the FBI, in 2021, the vast majority of mass shooters that year fell between 19 and 34 years old.
In 2021, of the 61 mass shooters recorded by the FBI, only one was female.
The FBI's data says that 83% of mass shooters in 2020 and 98% of mass shooters in 2021 were men. In 2020, of the 42 mass shooters, 35 were men.