On April 25, gunfire broke out at a White House dinner that included senior Trump administration officials. The person charged with attempted murder of the president is Cole Tomas Allen — a man. This episode fits a familiar pattern: a lone, heavily armed attacker directing violence at political leaders in a public setting. Why does the archetype of the would‑be killer so often map onto men? Women do attempt and carry out politically motivated violence, but targeted political assassinations by women are extremely rare.
Historical examples are few. In 1975 two women, Lynette Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, separately tried to shoot President Gerald Ford within days; one’s gun jammed, the other missed. In 1991 Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, an operative for the Tamil Tigers, killed Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi with a suicide bombing. There have been female suicide bombers and other politically motivated murders, but against a long list of male names — Booth, Oswald, Hinckley and others — women remain exceptional.
Women do commit public, firearm‑based violence: the YouTube shooter Nasim Aghdam and Tashfeen Malik, one of the San Bernardino attackers, are vivid examples. Yet these acts tend to be indiscriminate mass attacks rather than symbolically targeted strikes at a single political figure. Even across public gun violence more broadly, women are a small minority.
Explaining this pattern requires more than a quick appeal to innate temperament. Mid‑20th‑century accounts often leaned on presumed psychological or biological differences between the sexes. A better explanatory frame is sociological. Travis Hirschi’s control or social‑bond theory helps: most people refrain from crime because attachments, commitments, routines and beliefs tie them into conventional social life. Those bonds do not erase grievance, but they channel how grievance is expressed.
Viewed this way, the question changes. Women are not simply less angry or less alienated; the pathways that translate grievance into the very specific act of political assassination differ by gender. The 1975 attempts on Ford involved women who had been pulled out of ordinary social bonds and embedded in alternative meaning systems — cults or revolutionary networks — where killing a leader could be rendered intelligible and symbolically meaningful. Assassination requires not just grievance, but a narrative that makes killing a particular person a politically resonant act.
Gender is better understood as a structuring condition than as a deterministic cause. Socialization, expectations and constraints shape what responses appear available or legitimate. Historically, the script for political violence and the stereotypical image of an assassin have been masculine: solitary, focused, ideologically enraged or personally aggrieved. That image is constantly reproduced in news coverage, books and films, which make male assassins legible and memorable. When women appear in accounts of targeted political violence, they are often cast as anomalies, accomplices, or driven by private motives rather than by the same political logic applied to men.
Culture and media matter because they supply scripts — patterned ways of interpreting situations and acting. Repeated portrayals make some actions thinkable and others not. If the political assassin is coded as male, imagining a woman in that role becomes harder; this limits the cultural resources by which a woman might frame and carry out a politically targeted killing. Fictional counter‑scripts — for example, characters like Villanelle or La Femme Nikita — expand imaginative possibilities; over time such representations could shift what actions become culturally available.
Another frequent explanation is that mental illness or overheated rhetoric alone produces assassins. After the White House dinner shooting, a White House spokesman blamed political rhetoric and mental instability. That account is incomplete. If psychiatric disturbance were the sole factor, it would not produce such a stark gender gap.
The crucial difference appears to be how grievances are transformed into action. Men have greater cultural precedent, narrative templates, and sometimes social networks that legitimate assassination as a meaningful political act. Women may experience similar alienation but often channel it through different routes, shaped by gendered expectations about public behavior, social ties and acceptable forms of political expression.
This asymmetry is not fixed forever. Shifts in gender norms, changes in social roles, and the emergence of new cultural scripts could alter patterns of political violence. Movements that change public conversations about power and redress — for instance, #MeToo — may also affect how some women imagine direct retaliation, potentially widening the range of possible responses.
In short: women are not immune to detachment or radicalization, but assassination is a particular, symbolically loaded form of violence that requires a narrative in which killing a specific political figure carries political meaning. Historically and culturally that narrative has been coded masculine. Until and unless the scripts that make assassination imaginable for different actors change, the pattern of predominantly male would‑be killers is likely to continue — though cultural change means it should not be assumed permanent.