With authorities saying the heavily armed shooter who killed three children and three adults at a Presbyterian elementary school is a 28-year-old transgender man who was born a woman and previously attended the school, Nashville is on tenterhooks to learn more about this extraordinarily rare instance of a female school shooter.

Police received an initial phone call late Monday morning and responded to reports of gunfire at the Covenant School on Burton Hill Drive in Nashville, which teaches pre-kindergarten through sixth grade students. The three children killed were all nine years old.

The Nashville Metropolitan Police Department said that two officers “entered the building and went to the sounds of gunfire, engaged the shooter on the second floor and fatally shot her.” According to police, the shooter was carrying two “assault-style” weapons and one handgun. 

The shooter was killed less than 15 minutes after the first 911 call — a sharp contrast to the hours-long standoff last year at Uvalde, Texas, where officers waited for more than an hour to breach a classroom where a shooter killed 19 children and two teachers. 

At a press conference following the shooting, officials with the Metro Nashville Police Department said they believed the shooter was a former student identified as Audrey Hale. They have yet to determine a motive, but said they found maps of the school and what they described as a “manifesto” in a search of her residence.

Police later told the Nashville Tennessean that Hale is transgender and identified as a man but was born a female. They initially reported Hale to be female based on her birth name and gender. The paper said she is an illustrator and graphic designer that uses he/him pronouns.

Female mass killers are incredibly rare. According to data from the FBI, of the 61 active-shooter situations in 2021, just one of the perpetrators was female. According to the Violence Project, of the 173 mass shootings that have occurred since 1966, just four of the perpetrators have been women.

Experts say men are vastly more likely to commit shootings for a number of reasons. A professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, Jonathan Metzl, told the Associated Press that men’s higher testosterone levels, socialization, and higher rates of gun ownership contribute. 

“There is some story we don’t know here,” Mr. Metzl said of the Covenant shooter. “From school shootings historically, very often we think that people have some historical connection or emotional connection to the school. There’s an untold story here.”

Twitter and other social media are abuzz with various unsubstantiated reports and rumors about the shooter, but it’s not possible yet to draw any more conclusions until officials are able to give more details about the unfolding tragedy.