Gender “disappeared” in Albertville school shooting

On March 12, the hubby and I watched “Worldfocus,” an English-language news program from Germany on one of our public broadcasting stations. The top story, with extended coverage, was of the double-digit fatalities in a shooting spree by a 17-year-old boy. The first fatal scene was the boy’s high school, where all but one of his 11 victims were women and girls. He added five more murders during his escape, then killed himself.
 

The hubby and I were struck that the anchorman made a point of the gender of the school victims, but that the rest of the broadcast trot out the “usual suspects” of motive–violent video games and loner status, though some students interviewed by police said he was quiet and others said he was popular. I made a promise to myself to see what the follow-up to the story would reveal.

In the days that followed the breaking story, more about the gunboy was revealed–he had average to below-average grades, took antidepressants, was unhappy, may have warned about the attacks in an internet chat room, may NOT have warned about the attacks in an internet chat room. Many stories I read entirely erased the gender of his victims–both female and male. One cached story from the San Francisco Gate talked about targeting women, but when I clicked through to the story, the gender-specific statement had disappeared. All that was left was a bare-bones story that seemed have been taken from the preliminary breaking news of the tragedy.

The most I could find on the gender angle was this , from an Asian online news source called The Straits Time:

“German police are trying to establish why a teenage gunman appeared
to be targeting women and girls as investigators pick over the scene of
yesterday’s school shooting in one of the country’s richest regions.

“‘What strikes us is that most of the victims at school were
female,’ police spokesman Klaus Hinderer was quoted by Bloomberg News
after the murder of 15 people in Winnenden, near Stuttgart. ‘That could
be a hint as to why he did it.’ All but one of the victims of the
17-year- old While Germany was left in shock, the precedents are
plentiful. The trace runs from the Scottish town of Dunblane via
Columbine, Colorado, to Finland and then southern Alabama, where a
gunman shot dead at least 10 people just hours before the events in
Winnenden.

“‘I fear the events in Alabama lit the fuse that turned this tragic
youngster’s violent fantasies into fact,’ Christian Pfeiffer, director
of the Criminal Research Institute of Lower Saxony in Hanover, said in
an interview with Bloomberg. …Perpetrators know that they’ll gain an
instant global stage for their actions and this guy followed the script
with tragic accuracy: donned in black, armed to the teeth, dying in a
blaze of bullets,’ said Mr. Pfeiffer.”

This, the only story I could find that leads with the gender of the
school victims, spins itself away from this question to lump all school
shootings together and suggest, among other things, that the killer
wanted attention.

I have a question: why is the German government treating this mass slaughter as a hate crime?
This is a mixed-gender high school, yet nobody seems to want to discuss
the “hate that dare not speak its name.” Why aren’t media outlets
probing the gender angle the way they surely would if there had been 11
black students killed in a mixed-race high school?

I don’t know why this boy went on a killing rampage, and certainly
there may be more than one factor involved. But why has gender been
“disappeared” from the story? I think we should question our media
purveyors until we get some answers.