On April 25, gunshots rang out at a White House dinner attended by senior political figures of the Trump administration. The suspect, who has been charged with attempted murder of US President Donald Trump and more, is 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen — a man. This and comparable incidents follow a familiar script: a lone gunman, heavily armed, moving through a public space with lethal intent. Why is it always a gunman, not a gunwoman? Actually, it isn’t. But the exceptions are so rare that they barely register.

Women assassins: a very brief history

History offers very few examples of women attempting to assassinate political leaders, particularly presidents of the United States. In 1975, within the space of just 17 days, two women separately attempted to assassinate US President Gerald Ford. Lynette Fromme pointed a handgun at him, though it misfired. Sara Jane Moore went further and shot, missing her target. That’s not a cluster in a larger pattern: That’s the whole pattern.

Outside the US, there are isolated cases. Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 by detonating explosives at close range in Tamil Nadu, India. There a few other female suicide bombers: Here is a timeline.

Set against the long roll call of male assassins and would-be assassins — John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley Jr., among others — the near absence of women is difficult to neglect. These are not anomalies in an otherwise balanced field. They are exceptions in an overwhelmingly male domain.

There are women who have committed acts of public violence involving firearms. Nasim Aghdam, who opened fire at YouTube’s headquarters in 2018, is one example; Tashfeen Malik, who participated in a 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, is another. But these cases belong to a different category of violence, diffuse, often indiscriminate and not directed at a particular political figure. They’re relevant only because they confirm a broader point: Even across forms of public gun violence, women remain a tiny minority.

Bonds that don’t tie

Why aren’t there more female assassins? If you had asked in the mid-20th century, the answer would probably have centered on natural differences in psychological makeup or emotional dispositions. Now, this is inadequate. But there must be reasons and we need to widen the scope of our search to examine our ways of regulating or limiting human behavior.

Criminologist Travis Hirschi was something of a contrarian when it came to explaining criminal behavior — not just violent behavior, but any kind of transgression. He proposed that the central question is not why people offend, but why most do not. His answer involved what he called social bonds: attachments, commitments, routines and beliefs that tie individuals to the conventional social order and keep them invested.

These bonds don’t negate or eliminate causes for complaint, real or imagined; far from it. But they shape how grievances are managed and directed. They constrain and, in many cases, prevent them from finding expression in acts of violence.

Through Hirschi’s lens, we see the relative absence of female assassins but can’t assume women are less capable of anger, alienation and certainly not political disaffection. They have broadly similar experiences to men. Yet they do not always translate the experiences into action in the same way. Hirschi was writing in the 1960s and presumably didn’t feel obliged to answer why (as he would today). Let me try.

Consider again the attempts on Ford. Neither Fromme nor Moore acted in a vacuum. Both were embedded in alternative systems of meaning. Fromme was a devoted follower of cult leader Charles Manson, remaining loyal to his apocalyptic worldview even after his conviction for multiple murders. Moore, by contrast, moved in a looser, more diffuse revolutionary milieu. Both immersed themselves in countercultures where alternative beliefs, values and conceptions of right and wrong prevailed. In both cases, the crucial point is the same: Attachment had not disappeared. The bond was not broken so much as replaced.

Assassination is not just an act of violence; it is a highly specific form of directed violence. It requires not just the experience of grievance, but a sense of political or symbolic purpose; a belief that targeting a particular person carries value and meaning beyond the death of that individual. Women surely arrive at these kinds of conclusions in much the same way and with the same regularity as men. But they rarely act on their conclusions and attempt to kill a political figure.

Gender asymmetry

Does gender play a role? Not as a fixed attribute that determines behavior. Gender shapes how individuals interpret situations and particularly what responses appear available to them. It does this by offering patterns of expectation, obligation and constraint. These patterns neither prevent nor promote extreme acts. Rather, they influence the shape in which a sense of injustice or disaffection is expressed. Gender functions less as a cause than as a structuring condition, a way of organizing experience that makes certain actions more thinkable and preferable than others.

Assassination as a form of violence appears to require a particular alignment: Grievance combined with symbolic targeting featured in a narrative that renders the act meaningful. That alignment is widely available to men in both historical precedent and cultural imagination. For women, it is far less so.

This is where the asymmetry appears. The scarcity of female assassins is not simply a matter of numbers. It reflects a narrower set of available ways through which grievance can be translated into this specific form of political violence.

What remains, then, is not a closed explanation but a more sharply defined problem. Women are not absent from violence, nor are they immune to the forms of detachment Hirschi described. Yet the transition from disaffection to assassination occurs hardly ever. The reason for this isn’t obvious.

Reading the scripts

In the aftermath of the recent attempt on Trump’s life, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, wasted no time in declaring to the media that political rhetoric was “inspiring violence by people who are already mentally ill.”

It was arguably the most durable explanation of assassins available: “psycho killer.” But it doesn’t explain why the psycho killers are never female. The theory that men are, by nature, more disposed to extreme violence, whether by temperament or some deeper cognitive architecture, used to be invoked to explain patterns like this.

A more persuasive starting point returns us to Hirschi. His central insight that behavior is shaped less by rule-breaking than by the strength of social bonds applies across the gender board. It’s untenable to suppose that women, or indeed nonbinary individuals, are less susceptible to detachment, alienation or miscellaneous forms of grievance. The conditions that loosen attachments to the social order aren’t distributed according to gender.

The difference, then, lies not in exposure to those conditions but in how they are processed. Sociologists often invoke socialization, not as a catch-all explanation but as a set of identifiable influences on how we become functional social beings: family upbringing, peer groups, institutional expectations and the tacit understandings that shape what counts as an available gender-appropriate response to crisis or exclusion. In other words, how we react to situations.

In recent decades, another influence has assumed growing importance. The popular media does more than reflect social life; it helps manifest it. It offers not just images but scripts, patterned ways of interpreting situations and acting on them performatively, as we call it today. Certain roles and scripts become imaginable, even legible, through repetition and familiarity until they actually materialize as real.

In the case of assassins, those roles, scripts and performances have historically been masculine. The figure of the political assassin is lone, purposeful, full of bile and intent. This has been coded as such, reinforced across news, film and literature. Where women do appear, they are more often depicted ornamentally: as accomplices, anomalies or figures whose violence is sourced from specific personal exigencies.

There are signs of change. Popular culture has begun to experiment with alternative representations: fictional figures who complicate established patterns and expand the range of imaginable roles, such as Villanelle in the 2018 television series, Killing Eve, and before her in the 1990s, the mold-breaking Marie Clément, alias La Femme Nikita. Both are female assassins.

The dangers of overstating media influence are, of course, ever-present in contemporary culture. We tend to blame or credit the media with practically anything. All the same, we shouldn’t ignore the logical possibility that the expansion of available scripts may, over time, alter the manner through which extreme acts become thinkable.

For now, the shape remains. Women are not absent from violence, nor from the conditions that can give rise to it. Yet the route from disaffection to assassination remains a highly specific, symbolically charged act and remains, for them, rarely traveled. That will likely change. The #MeToo era has brought bountiful benefits for women. Yet it may also bring less welcome roles for women, roles that have been culturally prohibited or obstructed.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.