These people who go crazy with a gun aren't normal. I don't think you can make any generalization about a bias toward or against either gender. Their purpose was to kill people. I doubt that they thought at all about who their victims were, other than that they were there.
Nan, I totally agree with you and Terry that these people are mentally unbalanced. I don't think anyone can dispute that. And with every one of them, their motivations would have been slightly different. There's a whole list on wikipedia (
School shootings ), and I have no idea how accurate or how complete this list is. Of the incidents that I remember off the top of my head:
1. some of the killers just attacked blindly, not caring who their victims were;
2. some were after very specific individuals. The killers may or may not have been concerned when others got in the way.
And there are at least two cases - the Ecole Polytechnique shooting and the Amish shooting - where females
were specifically targeted. There may be others - I don't know.
Statistically we can't say that these two cases alone would indicate a trend towards females as desired victims of school shootings, as Ann was concerned about. But I do have to admit that I don't know of any cases where males were singled out, simply because they were males and for no other reason. So although I don't share Ann's concerns that this is a growing trend, one can't forget that these two cases do in fact exist.
Kathy
