Since you ask me about what specific information I have, Terry, I feel obliged to answer.
First of all, I don't have any specific overall information about the gender ratio of victims of school massacres. I have tried to find it on the web, but I have been unsuccessful. The closest I have come is this article:
School-Associated Violent Deaths in the United States, 1994-1999 According to this article,
The rate of school-associated violent death for male students was more than twice as high as the rate for female students.
However, the article also says,
The rate for non-Hispanic, black students was more than 3 times higher than the rate for non-Hispanic, white students.
I don't think that is generally true for typical school massacres.
The article also says,
Of the 220 school-associated violent death events, 202 involved the death of 1 victim
The way I see it, a school-associated violent death event that claims only one victim is not necessarily a typical school massacre. We have had two such events in Sweden. In one case, two young men came into a school to look for a student who owed them money in a drug-related case. They found the student, forced him into a school toilet and stabbed him to death. The other case was a young man who stalked his ex-girlfriend and stabbed her to death in a classroom. Neither case is your typical school massacre. Therefore, the statistics presented in the article I provided a link to may not describe the typical victims of school massacres.
I have not been able to find better statistics about the gender ratio of the victims of school massacres. All I have, therefore, are individual examples. First, though, I will quote a snippet I found about typical perpetrators in
this article:
they choose schools because while they are bound to be full of people at certain times, it's unlikely that any of those people are going to be armed or physically intimidating enough to put up a fight (yet another reason to target women, who tend to be smaller)
As you can see, this article suggests that it is common for school shooters to target women.
Let me present some indiviudal cases:
In 1989 in Montreal in Canada, Marc Lepine entered École Polytechinique, an engineering school whose students were likely predominantly male, separated the male and the female students in a classroom, and shot and killed nine women. All in all he killed fourteen people at that school, all women. See
Wikipedia .
In 1998 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, one eleven-year-old and one thirteen-year-old boy armed themselves and lay in ambush outside a school. When the school children left their classrooms for a break, the boys aimed at girls in the school yard. They killed four eleven- and twelve-year-old girls and one female teacher. See
Wikipedia .
In 2006 in Pennsylvania, a man entered an Amish school and ordered the boys to leave the classroom. He then shot and killed five girls, wounding still more girls. See
Wikipedia .
I don't think there has been any school shooting at a co-ed school which has claimed at least five male victims but not a single female one.
There have been other cases where there have been both male and female victims, although there has been a significant surplus of female victims.
In Dunblane in Scotland in 1996, a man shot and killed sixteen children, five boys and eleven girls. I remember from when the case was reported that the only uninjured child in the class was a boy, and the most severely wounded of the surviving children was a girl. See
Wikipedia .
In Osaka in Japan in 2001, a man entered a school and stabbed eight children to death, one boy and seven girls. See
Wikipedia .
And now in Kauhajoki in Finland last Tuesday, a young man entered a vocational school which has at least as many male students as female ones. He went from classroom to classroom until he found one he liked, where he killed nine students, one male and eight females. Another female student was critically injured.
Like I said before, we have not have any "school massacres proper" in Sweden. But in 1994 a young Army officer ran amok and shot and killed five young women he didn't know, severely wounding yet another young woman. Only when he had killed the women did he shoot and kill two men. The same year, in 1994, two criminal men wanted to get back at a bouncer who had denied them access to a nightclub in Stockholm. The two men shot the bouncer, but at the same time they also shot and killed three young women whom they didn't know, and who were unrelated to the bouncer.
I vaguely remember several rather 'unremarkable' school shootings, where there may have been just one victim, who, however, often seemed to be a girl. But since these cases didn't receive a lot of attention, precisely because they claimed so few victims, I can't remember the time or location of them, and I can't look them up. I do remember one horrendous school shooting at Erfurt, Germany, where there were very many victims, mostly teachers. But I have been unable to find out about the gender of the victims.
What does all of this prove? I don't know. I just see a pattern here.
Ann
