Kids and Guns: Rethinking School Shooters

A 17-year-old student did something horrible at a Wisconsin school. She used a gun to kill two people—a teacher and a classmate—before taking her own life. Several other students got hurt. The school is called Abundant Life Christian School, and it's in Madison, Wisconsin. This happened on a Monday. You might be wondering, do girls do this kind of thing more often now? Actually, the data says no. Even though mass shootings in the U. S. went up a lot since COVID-19 started in 2020, most of the people doing these terrible things are boys. This shooting is rare because girls usually don't do this. Another group, called Violence Prevention Project, says only four mass shootings since 1966 were done by girls. These shootings were in 2006, 2014, 2015, and 2019. So, it's not really happening more often. Stuart Kaplan, an ex-FBI special agent, thinks the police need to change how they think about shooters. He says it's no longer just boys doing this. We need to look at it differently. We'll find out more about what happened in this shooting as the investigation goes on.