Younger, female and Midwestern: How Natalie Rupnow defied the typical descriptions of a school shooter
The teenage shooter may be a statistical outlier, but school shootings are all too common, with the Abundant Life Christian School shooting marking the 205th incident of gun violence on school grounds this year alone
The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday
Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US
Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow opened fire in the hallways of Abundant Life Christian School, killing herself and two others and injuring six more. The story of school shootings, sadly, is familar. But Rupnow’s age, gender and other demographic features, surprisingly, are.
The 15-year-old girl brought a handgun to the private Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, Monday, killing a classmate and a teacher. Her motive and her relationship to the victims are not currently known.
The tragedy marks yet another grim statistic in American history — it is the 426th school shooting since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, a Washington Post analysis found. But Rupnow herself complicates other statistics, as she doesn’t align with what data show about school shooters.
For one, Rupnow was a girl.
Just 4 percent of all school shooters since Columbine are female; she was one of just eight female school shooters in that timeframe, according to the Post’s analysis. Research by Everytown for Gun Safety similarly showed that in 544 incidents of gunfire on school grounds since 2013, 25 were female — less than 5 percent.
This gender divide is also seen in other kinds of shootings. Of the 197 mass shooting incidents tracked by the Violence Prevention Project since 1966, only four shooters were female, one was transgender and 192 were male.
“Statistically, it is very rare that a school shooter is female,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown, told The Independent in a statement. “Nonetheless, we can’t lose sight of what really matters: no child should be dodging bullets while at school and no teenager should be able to get their hands on a gun.”
At age 15, Rupnow is also younger than the average school shooter — but shockingly, not by much.
The median age of a school shooter is 16, according to the Post.
While Wisconsin law provides some exceptions — allowing people under 18 to be armed so long as the weapon is used during “target practice under the supervision of an adult” or for someone in the armed forces — generally under both federal and Wisconsin statutes, it’s illegal for minors to possess handguns.
Still, more than half of the country’s school shootings were carried out by children, according to the Post. The question of how so many minors have been able to get their hands on firearms could be explained by the finding that 76 percent of school shooters obtained their gun from the home of a parent or relative, according to a 2019 Secret Service analysis.
It’s not immediately clear how Rupnow came in possession of the handgun that she used to carry out the mass killing. Wisconsin law also makes it illegal to “recklessly” store or leave a loaded firearm within the reach or easy access of a child — but a child is defined as a person under 14.
Madison Police have asked the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to “expedite” the process to determine “how it got from a manufacturer all the way to the hands of a 15-year-old girl,” Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes told CNN.
Months before the shooting, Jeff Rupnow, the teen’s father, posted a photo on Facebook in August capturing her wielding a shotgun and shooting clay pigeons at a local gun club.
Law enforcement and the DA’s office will “want to look at if the parents may have been negligent,” Barnes told the outlet. “But at this time, that does not appear to be the case.”
Her parents have not been formally accused of any wrongdoing.
The location of the shooting was also a rarity.
Gun deaths in Wisconsin are quite rare. The Midwestern state ranks 37th-highest in terms of gun deaths, according to Everytown. Across the country, states in the southeast have seen higher rates of school shootings since 2008, a CNN analysis found.
Of the 491 mass shootings in 2024 so far, only eight have occurred in Wisconsin, according to data from Gun Violence Archive. Of the reported 2,974 school shootings since 1966, 48 of them happened in the state, according to the K-12 school shooting database. By contrast, California and Texas were home to the most school shootings, with 277 and 237, respectively.
Rupnow may be an outlier, but gun violence at schools is all too common — and becoming more prevalent every year. This year has seen 205 incidents of gunfire on school grounds across the U.S., the most incidents in one year in the 11-year period tracked by Everytown.
”Gun violence is the number one killer of kids in this country, and we know how to solve it,” Brady United Against Gun Violence President Kris Brown said in a statement. “We owe it to our children to stop the next tragedy before it starts.”