Or do they? All this talk about guns and mental health issues got me thinking. Is mass shooting strictly a male sport or have we had females shoot lots of people at once too?
I can think of lots of cases where women have shot individuals and even cases like Ilene Warnos (sp?) where women have shot multiple people at different times. But all the mass shootings I can think of have been perpetrated by men.
Why would this be? If mental health is at the root of it, you would think we’d have women in the game too.
Extremes tend to be predominently male. That is, the male bell curves tend to have fatter, longer tails than the female ones. Spree shooters are far into the extreme end of a few bell curves at the same time. I think you need several extreme dysfunctions that fit together just right to become a spree shooter. Think of a spree shooter as the statistical equivalent of a 2 meter tall mathematical savant. You’ll find some 2 meter tall women and some female mathematical savants but very nearly all or all 2 meter tall mathematical savants will be male.
Males may be more biologically inclined towards confrontation and violence and are certainly more culturally inclined to it.
Men are more likely to own guns and be comfortable using them.
Men are more likely to keep feelings bottled up and blow up.
There have been women who went on killing rampages, but they make up a pretty small percentage of all rampage killers. This is not surprising, as women are also in the minority when it comes to committing murders. According to the FBI’s 2011 data on murder, a little under 8% of murders were committed by women. Even if all murders where the perpetrator’s sex is unknown (27%) were committed by women, female murderers would only account for about 1/3 of all 2011 murders. I believe female offenders are also outnumbered by male offenders when it comes to other violent crimes, although I couldn’t quickly find stats for this.
My mother loved Doom and other first person shooters.
A few thoughts:
[ul]
[li]Men are more variable than women; there are more male geniuses, but also more male idiots and lunatics. And shooting sprees are way out there on one end of the bell curve; even crazy men are very unlikely to do this. There’s simply fewer women who are this crazy.[/li][li]Women usually seem to think in more close personal terms. An unstable woman might drive over her husband or poison a co-worker, but she probably just doesn’t care enough about a bunch of random people to shoot them no matter how angry and ruthless she is.[/li][li]Nasty or enraged women tend to think more in terms of hurting people (physically or emotionally) than killing them. [/li][li]Women are more cautious by nature than men; and a suicidal murder spree is about as far from “cautious” as you can get.[/li][/ul]
Statistically speaking, it comes down to nature and nurture (6 of one, half a dozen of the other, and don’t ask me which one is which). However, I don’t think it’s really possible to figure out which of nature/nurture is more responsible–and I think that’s what you’re wondering. Perhaps we chicks are genetically prone to be more caring because of the whole babymaking thing. Perhaps parents also raise their girls to be more caring and emotionally expressive than their boys. Certainly both are likely factors, but there’s no way to tell how much of one or the other.
On the whole, women are more empathetic and less violent. We also cart around less testosterone (and thereby, lower levels of aggression) than men. The end.
Children are most likely to be murdered by a male non-biologically related family member (stepdad or mom’s BF). But for children who are murdered by biologically related members, it’s more likely to be mom than dad. Family pets, in turn, are more likely to be killed by the kids than the parents.
People just prefer to kill those weaker than themselves. Excepting Oswalds and Princips who are out to make a grand gesture, they tend to like easy prey. Our ancestors were scavengers tens of thousands of years longer than they were hunters.
Women are probably more likely to be emotionally and verbally abusive and violent (though can be physically abusive, especially to children). Men are probably more likely to be physically abusive and violent. I don’t think women think in terms of violence the same way. We’re just as mean, just as vicious, and just as callous, but we’re more likely to be surreptitious about it, probably a result of having a lot of people around who can take us out, physically.
Then there’s the whole bell curve mentioned above.
I don’t think it’s in any way a reflection of some better nature, just some physical realities and the way those realities shape personal expression.
Women typically don’t initiate sex. And predatory females tend to lean more towards sadism and greed than sex; an abusive woman probably won’t molest a kid, but she might skin the kid’s pet rabbit alive in front of her while telling the kid “You’re next” (a real-world example).
Yes, it’s true that women tend to be “more empathetic” than men, that they care about people’s feelings more; but that doesn’t make women automatically nice, it just means that nasty women lean more towards physical & especially emotional sadism than men do. Just listen to men and women describe the kind of harassment and bullying they went through in school from their own gender; boys got beat up by other boys, while girls spent their time sticking emotional knives in each other.
Another woman, who committed a shooting spree in a school: Laurie Dann. In this case, before the shooting, police were concerned about her owning a gun in light of her behavior like harassing phone calls to her ex, but were unable to persuade her or her family to have her give it up. Within the next two years, she escalated to a fake rape charge against her ex, threatening phone calls and death threats to many people she knew, and finally mailed out arsenic-poisoned snacks to former friends, then attacked the school and killed herself at the end.
