The suspected YouTube shooter was a woman — here’s how rare that is

pulse

April 4, 2018 6:31 PM

Police identified 39-year-old Nasim Aghdam as the shooter who fired off a handgun at YouTube on Tuesday, injuring three, and killing herself.

The
Authorities identified 39-year-old blogger
Aghdam injured two women and one man (who's in critical condition), before
killing herself.
It's extremely rare for a woman to commit this kind of violent, angry tirade against strangers.

When a 39-year-old video blogger from San Diego walked onto the YouTube campus Tuesday and started shooting, even some of the witnesses around campus assumed she was a man.

It's understandable that people might expect a person with a gun to be male. Nearly all of the people behind the ten deadliest mass shootings in the US have been men. There's only one woman on that list: Tashfeen Malik, who was one half of the husband and wife pair that killed 14 people, and then themselves, in the 2015 San Bernardino shooting.

Whether the YouTube shooting qualifies as a mass shooting is a technical question that is answered in different ways depending on who you ask. The US Department of Homeland Security defines a "mass attack" as any incident where "three or more persons" are harmed in a public place, seemingly chosen at random. Others at the Gun Violence Archive say a "mass shooting" must include at least four victims who aren't the shooter.

Either way, it's clear that the incident at YouTube, tragic as it may be, wasn't on the same deadly scale as events like the recent Parkland school shooting, the Southerland Springs church shooting, or any of the other deadly mass shootings that are happening with increasing frequency in the US.

How many women kill people with guns?

However you count them up, it's clear there aren't many women on the list of deadly shooters. Men are both more likely to be the perpetrators and the victims of all homicides committed with a gun. The US Department of Justice says that trend holds true for all kinds of murders, not just mass shootings.

A study of US homicides published in 1992 suggests that women, who make up 50.8% of the US population, commit roughly 15% of the homicides in the country. Even when women do kill other people, it's more often a spouse or family member than a stranger. Men, on the other hand, tend to kill strangers and acquaintances when they murder people with guns.

It's a trend that holds up around the world. A 2015 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says that "the vast majority of homicide perpetrators are male." The UN also notes that men aren't just the ones doing the shooting, they're more often hurt, too. Homicide kills men around the world from the ages of 15-29 at disproportionately high rates, and men account for "an average of 95% of all persons convicted of homicide," everywhere around the world.

A pattern of angry and vocal shooters is emerging in the US

Gun Violence and Mental Illness many of the recent shootings that have made news have been perpetrated by angry, grudge-holding individuals with poor coping skills who are acting out. Often, "

pulse