The 28-year-old Nashville resident who unleashed deadly terror at a private Christian elementary school in Tennessee on Monday is just the fifth non-male mass shooter in US history, data shows.
Audrey Hale, who police said identified as transgender, shot dead three children and three adults after she stormed into the Covenant School armed with two assault-style rifles and a pistol.
She was subsequently shot dead by cops after a roughly 14-minute shooting spree.
According to the Violence Project database, women make up just 2% of mass shooters across the country.
The database, which hasn’t yet accounted for the Nashville shooting, shows that just four of the 191 mass shooters it has tracked since 1966 are females.
Two of those four women had partnered with a male gunman, the data shows.
The Violence Project’s national database defines a mass shooting as involving four or more slain victims.
Brenda Spencer, while not accounted for in the database, is among the more notorious female mass shooters.
At age 16, Spencer opened fire at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego in January 1979.
The shooting left eight children injured and two adults — the principal and school custodian — dead.
Asked why she carried out the massacre, Spencer — who remains in a California prison — notoriously told a reporter: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.”
In more recent years, there have been several other high-profile female mass shooters — including YouTube gunman Nasim Aghdam.
Aghdam stormed the company’s headquarters near San Francisco in 2018 after police said she had become disgruntled with the video platform.
She wounded three others before turning the gun on herself.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the school shooting in Nashville
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- Police ‘strongly believe’ Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale had other targets
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- Fundraiser for slain Nashville school custodian raises more than $350K in a day
- School shooter’s parents ‘couldn’t accept’ their daughter’s trans identity: report
In 2015, Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Farook, wreaked havoc at a social services facility in San Bernardino, California, when they opened fire, killing 14 and wounding another 17.
A subsequent shootout with cops left both suspects dead.
That same year, 23-year-old Latina Williams shot dead two fellow students at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge.
She shot herself in the head just moments later.
Years earlier in 2006, Jennifer San Marco gunned down six postal workers at a sorting center in Goleta, California, where she’d once worked.
Earlier that day, San Marco had also shot dead a former neighbor.
Experts say there are multiple reasons why men are more prone to carrying out mass violence.
Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, argued that men have more testosterone, typically own more guns than females, and are socialized to be engaged in violence.
Meanwhile, separate data compiled by the FBI shows that only one of the 61 mass shootings carried out in 2021 was done by a woman.
With Post wires
