Six common factors in the school shooting at Abundant Life Christian

A 15-year-old girl opened fire inside a classroom on Monday morning in Madison, WI. This shooting follows the same patterns as hundreds of other attacks at schools.

The school shooting this week at Abundant Life Christian in Madison, WI is tragic and senseless, but it’s not at all shocking. Deliberately planned school shootings happen multiple times every school year, mostly in smaller rural and suburban communities. The perpetrators of these attacks are almost always actively suicidal current or former students at the school they target.

Back in April, I wrote an article for the 25th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting. This trend line turned out to be sadly accurate. With the shooting at Abundant Life Christian, there have been five pre-planned attacks at schools this year.

Regardless of how you measure school shootings--guns fired, wounded, killed, active shooter, planned attacks, or near misses--the trend line is going up. While these planned school shootings have taken place since the 1960s, the frequency of the attacks is steadily increasing.

Like the other planned attacks this year in Perry, IA, Mount Horeb, WI, Apalachee, GA, and Palermo, CA, these incidents have common patterns and connections to prior school shootings. The number of ‘near misses’ where a school shooting almost happen are also going up.

Columbine connection

The father of the 15-year-old Madison, WI, school shooter posted a facebook photo of his daughter at a shooting range in August. His cover photo shows Natalie Rupnow, who went by the name Samantha, shooting a skeet.

Natalie can be seen wearing a black shirt with the name of the band KMFDM. The German industrial rock band’s lyrics were thrust into the dark subculture of school shooters by the students who carried out the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School.

In the Columbine ‘basement tapes’, Dylan Klebold can be seen wearing the same shirt. It’s critical for parents to study prior school shooters, know their names and faces, and recognize symbols like KMFDM that represent idolization of prior attacks.

In January 2024 at Perry High, the 17-year-old student perpetrator entered the school with a shotgun, pistol, knife, and IED inside a duffle bag (important note: both planned attacks at schools in the spring of 2024 involved IEDs). He spent 22 minutes inside a school bathroom where he posted photos of himself with the gun, posted on a Discord ‘school shooting massacres’ channel, posted the same KMFDM song played by the Columbine shooters, and started a livestream on social media.

Insider Attacks

The Madison shooting follows the common patterns with planned attacks at schools. The perpetrator was a student (insider), committed a surprise attack during morning classes, and died by suicide before police arrived.

Most school shootings are committed by current or former students who are “insiders” at the school and know the security plan/procedures.

Since an insider is someone who is allowed to be inside the school, most of these attacks are committed by current students.

Female school shooter

Yesterday, I co-published an article in the Los Angeles Times: Here’s what is so unusual about the Wisconsin school shooting — and what isn’t

The public’s attention often focuses on the gender of the perpetrators. After the March 2023 mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, the shooter’s transgender identity was much discussed. After other school shootings, “toxic masculinity” has been highlighted, along with the well-documented fact that the majority of mass shootings are perpetrated by men and boys.

In our recently released K-12 school homicide database, which details 349 homicides committed at K-12 schools since 2020, only 12 (3%) of the perpetrators were female. There have been some notable cases involving female school shooters. In 1988, a female babysitter walked into a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Ill., and told the students she was there to teach them about guns; she opened fire, killing an 8-year-old boy and wounding five other students.

In Rigby, Idaho, in 2021, a 12-year-old girl plotted to kill 20 to 30 classmates. Armed with two handguns, she walked out of a bathroom and began firing in the hallway, wounding two students and the custodian. A teacher heard the shots, left their classroom, and hugged the shooter to disarm her.

The earliest case in our records was in 1979, when a 16-year-old girl opened fire at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, killing two and injuring nine. This was when the American public was first introduced to a female school shooter. Her infamous explanation for her actions — “I just don’t like Mondays” — is etched in pop culture. But it was less about a flippant attitude and more about despair. At a parole hearing years later, the shooter admitted the truth: “I wanted to die.” She saw her attack as a way to be killed by police.

Her story reflects what we now know: Most school shooters are suicidal, in crisis and driven by a mix of hopelessness and rage.

With each school shooting, we tend to concentrate on details: the rare female shooter, the high-profile massacre, the immediate response of authorities. But if we step back, we tend to see the same story repeated again and again. A student insider. In crisis. Suicidal.

Inside during morning classes

Pre-planned school shootings usually take place during morning classes or at the start of the school day when the building is open before classes start.

Just like the shooting in Wisconsin this week, the most common outcome is the teenage student shooter commits suicide, surrenders, or is subdued by students or staff before police intervene.

Begins and ends in the same room

While ‘active shooter training’ videos produced by the Department of Homeland Security and ads by security tech vendors portray assailants roaming throughout a building while searching for every possible victim, most school shootings begin and end in the same room.

There isn’t much use for a ballistic chalkboard, drop bar lock on the door, or panic button when the victims are all in close proximity to an armed assailant who is inside the same room with them.

Following this pattern, the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, WI took place in a classroom during study hall and the victims were all in the same age group. The teenage shooter didn’t roam the building looking for the elementary school kids, she killed herself before police arrived.

Police usually don’t stop these single shooter insider attacks because they are very short duration incidents that are usually over within the first 2 minutes.

Concealed Handguns

When a student is committing a surprise attack inside a school, the easiest weapon to sneak inside is a handgun. Most students who are arrested inside schools with guns have a handgun hidden inside their backpack. Because of that, it’s not a surprise that a handgun is the most common weapon used during a school shooting by an insider.

During just these deliberately planned attacks over the last 60 years (these victim counts in the chart do not represent all shootings on school property), there have been roughly twice as many victims killed or wounded with handguns versus rifles.

This doesn’t mean that rifles aren’t as dangerous. At Apalachee High, a student committed an insider attack by sneaking an AR-15 into the building inside a posterboard. Until the last decade, AR-15s weren’t cheap and easily accessible. As there continue to be more school shootings involving rifles, this chart will likely even out over time (unless we take meaningful action to stop these attacks.

Preventing the next school shooting

I spoke to NBC 5 Investigates on Monday afternoon right after the school shooting. I said that this shooting at Abundant Life Christian School followed a common pattern in that it was carried out by an “insider” - a student familiar with the school grounds.

“We need to understand the actual nature of this problem and apply solutions towards identifying the student who has a grievance, identifying a student who is talking about students and realizing that these are rarely random acts. All the opportunities to prevent it happen before they ever come to campus with a gun,” Riedman told NBC 5 Investigates.

Riedman said the focus should not be on fortifying schools with additional weapons detectors or metal detectors but focusing on the students’ behaviors that may help foretell a future incident - adding that there is a need to “dispel the myth that these school shootings are committed by scary outsiders,” when data shows that they are often committed by those who are familiar with the school and have a grievance that ends in violence.

“We will probably hear in the coming days about a series of missed warning signs, social media posts, a manifesto and so on,” he said.

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David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.