University of Alabama’s shooter is a rare killer

Something unusual happened in Alabama Friday afternoon. A woman committed mass murder. She opened fire in a biology faculty meeting at the University of Alabama’s Huntsville campus. Police took Dr. Amy Bishop, a Harvard-trained scientist, into custody unharmed, on suspicion of killing three faculty members and seriously wounding three other adults. This was not the first woman to be suspected of committing mass murder, but she’s a rarity. A female shooter upends the “profile”—the now-famous staple of so many crime shows—contradicting one of the few elements of that is actually accurate. The prevailing notion that spree shooters are typically affluent, white, outcast loners is a complete myth. “There is no accurate or useful profile of students who engaged in targeted school violence,” according to the definitive study of all “targeted” school shootings in the U.S. in a recent 26-year period conducted by the Secret Service and Department of Education. Other experts on mass murder have come to similar conclusions. But the perps are almost always male. In the school shootings studied by the Secret Service, 100 percent of the shooters were men. (The report's rigorous inclusion criteria eliminated some shootings, but provided an extensive and focused data sample.) Still, there have been exceptions to the rule. In 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer, shot up a school from the window of her own home, killing two students and wounded nine others at Grover Cleveland Elementary school in San Diego County. She was denied parole for the fourth time last fall. And two years ago, a woman fatally shot two students before turning the gun on herself at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge. added by: Future_America