Rage?
On a slightly related topic, interesting patterns regarding weapon or method choice. Someone stated earlier that a woman is much more likely to use a bat. That's sort of untrue. They tend to be more "distant" in their methods of killing and "cleaner" according to this study:
Gun use varies greatly depending on gender of perp and victim. If it's male on male, 72% of the homicides will be via gun. If it's male on female, that drops to 48.5 and 46.9 % of homicides involving females against females involve guns. Guns are still the preferred method of choice but not that homicide includes sudden killings that weren't planned.
Weapon and circumstances
Some of the largest gender differences are related to the weapon used to commit murder. Whereas both sexes employ firearms most often because of their accuracy and lethality, men tend to rely on guns more so than women. As shown in
Table 3, nearly three-quarters of male offenders and nearly half of their female counterparts kill their victims with a firearm.
Women often prefer more distant and cleaner means of committing murder. In fact, women are responsible for nearly 40% of homicides involving poison, drugs, drowning, and asphyxiation. Drowning and asphyxiations by women are especially prevalent in homicides of children. Two-thirds of infanticides (victims less than age 5) are committed by women (primarily mothers or step-mothers), and 80% of homicides of victims less than the age of 1 year implicate a female perpetrator.
Table 3. Incident Characteristics by Victim and Offender Sex, 2000–2015
Victim sex Offender sex
Male (%) Female (%) Male (%) Female (%)
Weapon
Gun 72.3 48.5 69.5 46.9
Knife 11.5 16.7 11.4 19.5
Other 16.2 34.8 19.1 33.6
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
Who the killer kills also varies by gender with only 11% of female homicide victims being killed by a stranger.
Victim–offender relationship
Despite the sizable overrepresentation of males among homicide victims and especially offenders, the gender gap narrows substantially when the perpetrator and victim have a close relationship. Although the vast majority of homicides committed by men (81%) involve an acquaintance or stranger as victim, more than half of female perpetrators kill intimate partners or family members (
Table 3). In terms of victimization, 30% of males but only 11% of females are killed by a stranger. Victim age interacts with gender in the prevalence of murders committed by intimate partners or family members. For child victims, the percentage killed by a family member is virtually identical for boys and girls and declines from 80% down to about 40% into early adolescence. From that age forward, murders committed by intimate partners begin to occur with the proportion of women being killed by someone close to them greatly outnumbering that of men (
Fig. 7).
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/vio.2017.0016
