Actually it's 49 male victims and 52 female victims.
I'm sure you are right.
This doesn't seem to me like there is a skew towards any gender.
Not much of a skew, no. But it is a far cry from what the study found that I quoted in a previous post. That study looked at the years 1994-1997 and made this conclusion:
The rate of school-associated violent death for male students was more than twice as high as the rate for female students.
Whatever you can say about the figures I found, they most certainly
don't show that male students are more than twice as likely as female students to be killed during school shootings.
It is worth bearing in mind that more than twice as many male students as female students were killed by school violence in America between 1994 and 1997. The excess of male victims suggests to me that much on the violence was 'ordinary' male-on-male violence that got out of hand. Boys fight each other because they are peers and equals, pretty much. They fight each other for status and pecking order and sometimes for girls or for turf. We see that sort of thing among so many animal species, too: the males fight each other. It is nowhere near as 'natural' for boys to use violence against girls, or at least I don't think it is. And indeed, in the school shooting incidents listed by Wikipedia that took place between 1966 and 1992, there were few if any cases were there was even an equal number of male and female victims. Back then, even in school shootings, the male perpetrators primarily targeted other males. Their school massacres might be seen as a catastrophic extension of the competition between males that society accepted, even blessed.
But something has happened. What has happened is
not that all male school shooters have given up targeting other males, and started killing only girls instead. It is also not true that all school shooters have become 'equal opportunity killers', taking care to kill about the same number of males and females. No, we still have the boys who kill other boys, like they used to. And we still have those who kill without regard to gender or ethnicity, like the Virginia Tech killer seemed to do. Also, we have those who kill their principal, because the principal is the most important symbol of the school these killers hate. And in the list of school shootings that I found, the murdered principals were always men.
But we now have a new group of killers that, I think I can say with some confidence, didn't roam schools before. These are the ones that exclusively or primarily kill females. We didn't have those school killers before.
Ann
