We are talking about a male killer who, police believe, was targeting women. It's not the first crime of this type and sadly won't be the last. "Incel culture", for want of a better phrase, is a recognised motive for men carrying out mass attacks on predominantly female victims.
If we move away from the motive and look at similar mass attacks where the attacker did not seem to discriminate between potential victims in such an obvious way, there is still an undeniable pattern that mass murderers are almost always male.
Check this out:
Female mass murderers.
Although Wikipedia isn't a wholly reliable source and there may be examples missing, this list strikes me as very short.
Then you go and read some of these cases and a few points are striking.
- Some of these go back a very long way. One of these women was a slave who was executed in 1828.
- A significant number of names on this list are women who were convicted of war crimes for their role in the Holocaust. Terrible, yes, but doesn't fit the same pattern we are seeing here.
- Of the names remaining on the list, most of them were not acting alone, but alongside a male accomplice. Shabnam Ali, for example, murdered seven members of her own family acting alongside her male lover. So again, doesn't fit this pattern.
- Of the names still remaining, there is usually an obvious motive for the murders. For example, Nasra Yussef carried out an arson attack at her husband's wedding to his second wife. Again, doesn't fit the pattern.
- We also see a small number of women involved in Islamic terrorist attacks.
Has there ever been a female "lone wolf" attacker, who carried out random attacks on people just going about their lives?
I have never heard of one.
This is a male crime, and in this instance it seems to have been deliberately targeted towards female victims.
Sall Grover has pointed out the irony of the police being so clear about this when technically, the concept of male and female no longer really exists in Australian law.