Earlier this week, transgender activist Charles “Charlotte” Clymer, a biological male who pretends to be a woman, argued that non-transgender people are more likely to commit mass shootings than transgender people.
“It seems the Republican Party, as usual, just can’t do basic math,” he insisted. “Since Jan. 1, 2016, there have been 3,580 mass shootings in the United States based on the gun violence archive. Less than five of those have been trans. So, we’re saying that 99.7%,, at least, of the mass shooters have not been transgender. So, if we’re going to ban someone, maybe we should ban people who are not transgender from owning weapons, if that’s the logic.”
Clymer added, “They’re not trying to fix the problem. They’re trying to weaponize it and exploit these senseless deaths.”
On his website, Clymer elaborates on his so-called research, noting that a report by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that “the trans community makes up about 0.6 percent of the 267.8 million people in the United States who are age 13 or older.”
“So, trans people make up 0.6 percent of the population but 0.1 percent of mass shooters, six times less than what would be proportionally expected in an even distribution of mass shooters.” This leads Clymer to conclude “cis people are disproportionately more likely to be mass shooters.”
Related: LGBT Organizations Fail to Condemn Nashville School Shooting
Now, it is worth noting here that he cites the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) for the number of mass shootings. In its methodology, GVA defines a mass shooting as an incident where four or more people are killed, excluding the shooter. But there’s a problem. GVA is notorious for its flawed methodology. We shouldn’t trust how it comes up with its numbers.
However, the nonprofit group Everytown For Gun Safety uses the same definition but says, “Since 2009, there have been 306 mass shootings in the United States.”
With the same definition, the Gun Violence Archive claims there have been more than ten times as many mass shooting incidents in just over six years than Everytown For Gun Safety says occurred over just over 13 years. There’s a reason why gun control advocates often cite GVA for gun-related statistics, and it’s not because of its commitment to accuracy. Everytown is definitely not a pro-gun organization, so it’s safe to say that their methodology is a more fair and more accurate reflection of how many mass shooting there really are. Everytown’s numbers are even larger than the number calculated by the left-wing magazine Mother Jones, which puts the number of mass shootings from 1982-2023 at 141, including Monday’s shooting in Nashville. Let’s not even pretend they’re a pro-gun publication because they’re not.
So, what do the statistics say about the prevalence of transgender mass shooters?
There have been four mass shooters that we know by those who have identified as transgender, which means that 1.3 percent of mass shooters have been transgender. If we use the same number Clymer cited regarding how many transgender people there are in the United States, trans people make up 0.6 percent of the population but 1.3 percent of mass shooters, based on Everytown’s numbers. This means that transgender people are more than twice as likely to be mass shooters than non-transgender people. If we go by Mother Jones‘s numbers, 2.83 percent of mass shooters have been committed by transgender people, which means that transgender people are nearly five times as likely to be mass shooters as non-transgender people. And that’s before we even consider the question as to whether the “gender identity” of every mass shooter in the incidents cataloged is even known.
In fairness, I’m far more inclined to use Everytown’s numbers than Mother Jones‘s—but I would argue that both are more accurate than GVA, and that this actually makes a great deal of sense, given the connection between transgenderism and mental illness. It all comes back to mental health. And the fact that trans activists and LGBT allies are constantly pushing the “trans genocide” conspiracy theory, I think it is reasonable to suspect more transgender-identifying people will be perpetrators of violence in the future.
