When mass shootings happen, the media rush to control the conversation, often burying the facts under layers of denial and political correctness. After the Minneapolis Catholic school shooting at the hands of a transgender shooter, the media have been working overtime to downplay the shooter’s transgender identity and dispute claims that trans people are more likely to commit such acts. I’m going to prove them wrong.
Like clockwork, the liberal media sought to control the narrative about the latest shooting and run interference for the trans community.
“Just one day after the horrific event, it isn’t yet possible to conclude why the suspected killer choose to do what she did,” Mother Jones wrote Thursday, using the shooter’s preferred pronouns. “But what we can say is that, despite the probable identity of yesterday’s attacker, there is no evidence that transgender people are any more likely to commit mass shootings.”
USA Today similarly jumped into the discussion, insisting that there is “not an 'epidemic' of shootings by trans people,” in its headline. The author also made this claim:
Americans who identify as transgender do not attack and kill people at a disproportionate rate. And, according to several experts on extremism and mass shootings interviewed by USA TODAY, there's no evidence gender identity had any influence on Robin Westman's decision to shoot children at a Catholic school.
This isn’t exactly a new conversation. In recent years, the correlation between trans-identifying people and violent acts like mass shootings has become rather impossible to ignore. After a mass shooting in a Georgia school last year, where some claimed the shooter was transgender, Reuters debunked a viral myth that transgender people carry out most mass shootings. Obviously, we know this isn’t true. People who identify as transgender represent less than 1% of the population; it is statistically improbable for them to be responsible for most of the mass shootings.
But the issue here is whether they are disproportionately likely to commit such acts of violence. We already know that men are heavily overrepresented among mass shooters, making up roughly 98% of all mass shooters despite being half the population. In contrast, women are vastly underrepresented, accounting for only about 2.3% of shooters despite being roughly half the population.
But what about trans-identifying people?
Snopes tried to debunk the claim that trans people are disproportionately likely to commit such acts. According to Snopes, “There were 195 mass shootings committed by 200 people between 1966 and 2024 that met the [Violence Policy Center’s] definition. Of those 200 mass shooters, VPP only listed one perpetrator as transgender: the 2023 Nashville shooter. That's 0.50% of all the shooters.”
This is false. Since 2016, trans-identifying people have committed at least four mass shootings that meet the VPP’s definition of a mass shooting. They include the 2024 Chicago train shooting, the 2023 shooting at the Covenant school in Nashville, the 2022 Colorado Springs shooting, and the 2018 Rite Aid Warehouse Shooting, which were all incidents meeting the VPP's definition of a mass shooting where the perpetrator identified as transgender or nonbinary.
Related: This May Be the Worst Media Gaslighting About the Minneapolis Shooting Yet
That's four shootings (at least) of the 195 mass shootings based on the VPP definition. That means trans-identifying individuals have been responsible for at least 2% of mass shootings in the U.S. between 1966 and 2024, despite making up only 0.6% of the population. Men dominate these attacks, accounting for 98% of perpetrators, while representing roughly half the population — a share that is twice their actual proportion. Women make up just 2% of shooters, despite being half the population, which makes their likelihood extremely low.
Trans-identifying individuals, though far rarer, commit mass shootings at a rate more than three times their population share, exceeding the rate of men. While men drive the vast majority of these tragedies, trans-identifying perpetrators appear disproportionately in mass shooting statistics relative to their population size.
The media, of course, ignore this inconvenient reality because admitting it would shatter their narrative and force a conversation they don’t want to have. So they downplay, deflect, and hope no one bothers to run the numbers. But the math doesn’t lie: Trans-identifying individuals are statistically more likely than men to commit mass shootings, and pretending otherwise won’t make the truth go away.
