Males are not the only perpetrators of rampage, mass, and targeted shootings.

Sexism, media, and semantics lead to the underestimation of females' capacity for violence.

When a couple plots a mass or targeted attack, virtually 100% of the time the female is the primary planner.

When teaching others on threat assessment, I rely on post-incident analyses from past mass and targeted shootings, and show trainees and students photos of shooters from Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas to prove a point. I don't caption the photos, yet every single time, those in attendance are able to identify the shooters by name. Sadly, they live in infamy, with some even having fan clubs on Discord and other social media sites. As an example, there is a group of youth, Columbiners, who admire the Columbine shooters to the extent they have their images tattooed on their bodies. They idolize the killers.

In a recent training, I showed attendees photos of several females who committed, or planned to commit, similar acts as the males identified above. Not a single attendee could identify any of the photos. In fact, some thought the females were victims rather than violent women.

The danger in this is that warning signs of dangerous females are missed or ignored, resulting in a greater likelihood of females slipping through the cracks and killing others in manners similar to the worst male perpetrators.

Semantics, Media, and Sexism

Three contributors to the misconception that females simply don't commit acts of mass or targeted violence are semantics, media, and sexism. Let's break that down. Related to semantics, people often utilize "mass," "rampage," and "targeted" killings interchangeably, which often leads to the exclusion of female shooter data from official counts because there tend to be........

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