Shooters in U.S. are rarely women

During the first seconds after the shooting at YouTube headquarters, some eyewitnesses mistook the female assailant for a man. “He had a shooting mask on full body armor and was calmly walking and firing a handgun,” one YouTube employee posted on Facebook. Female active shooters are rare. Here’s a look at some of the statistics:

FBI REPORTS

Of 160 active-shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013 that the FBI studied, six involved a female shooter — 3.8 percent of the total.

Two of the shootings by women happened in California. A 36-year-old woman killed one person and wounded three at a San Jose transit yard in 2001. Five years later, a 44-year-old former postal worker killed six in Goleta (Santa Barbara County), then committed suicide.

MOTHER JONES REPORT

Of 98 U.S. mass shootings that reporters for Mother Jones magazine counted going back to 1982, only two were committed by women acting alone.

One was in February 2014 in Alturas (Modoc County), when a 44-year-old woman opened fire in a tribal office and community center, killing four and wounding two. The other was the Goleta shooting.

A third massacre — the San Bernardino terrorist shooting in December 2015 in which 14 died and 21 were wounded — involved a husband and wife working together.

OTHER STATISTICS

School shootings: Almost all school shooters have been boys. Researchers at the University of Washington Tacoma recently studied 11 thwarted plots by female students to shoot up their schools. “Incidents involving female plotters are often less serious in terms of their genuine threat,” the researchers concluded, “and female plotters are more likely to intervene to stop the violence from actually being carried out.”

Arrests: In California, women account for 21.4 percent of all arrests for violent offenses, while men account for 78.6 percent, and 11 percent of all homicide arrests compared with 89 percent for men.

Overall homicides: In homicide across the United States, women are less likely than men to use firearms to kill. According to 30 years of data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 92.1 percent of homicides by firearm were committed by men and only 7.9 percent by women.