This FBI Study Shows Just How Rare Female Mass Shooters Are
When an active shooter was reported at YouTube’s San Bruno, Calif., headquarters on Tuesday, it became the latest in a string of chilling incidents that have begun to feel all too familiar.
But the YouTube incident had one major difference from other recent tragedies: It involved a female suspected shooter, 39-year-old San Diego resident Nasim Aghdam. Aghdam was found dead at the scene from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Though law enforcement officials have not identified a possible motive in the YouTube shooting, Aghdam was a prolific YouTube user — and a vocal critic of the site, which she claimed “discriminated and filtered” her videos to reduce their viewership.
While there’s no such thing as a profile of a mass shooter, female perpetrators are exceedingly rare, according to a 2014 study by the FBI. The study, which examined 160 active shooter incidents that occurred in the U.S. between 2000 and 2013, found that just 3.8% of these attacks — six in total — involved a female shooter. An additional three incidents involving female shooters occurred between 2014 and 2016, according to FBI records.
The most recent mass shooting involving a woman, according to the Washington Post, was the deadly 2015 attack on an office party in San Bernardino, Calif., which left 14 people dead.
