At least nine people are dead and 25 wounded after a shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in northeast British Columbia. The school had just 170 students, grades seven through 12, in a town of 2,400 people. The shooter was found dead at the scene with a self-inflicted injury. Two more bodies turned up at a nearby home, also believed to be victims of the same person.
Canada can boast about its strict gun laws all it wants. They didn’t stop this mass shooting. But gun control isn't the conversation we need right now. What we need is honesty about transgenderism and mental illness.
See, the shooter has been identified as 17-year-old Jesse Strang, a male who identifies as a girl, and reportedly started transitioning two years ago. So, yes, we have another trans shooter, and you can bet we’re going to see the media downplay this fact and pretend it doesn’t matter. We’ve seen it before.
After last year's Minneapolis shooting at Annunciation Catholic School, the press worked overtime to erase the shooter's transgender identity from the story. Mother Jones dared to claim "there is no evidence that transgender people are any more likely to commit mass shootings,” and insisted that it wasn't yet possible to conclude why the killer did what she did. Still, somehow, they were absolutely certain gender confusion had nothing to do with it. USA Today tried to cover up reality by insisting there wasn’t "an 'epidemic' of shootings by trans people."
They quoted several experts who assured readers that Americans who identify as transgender "do not attack and kill people at a disproportionate rate." They claimed there was no evidence that gender identity had any influence on Robin Westman's decision to shoot children at a Catholic school.
Related: At Least 9 Dead, 25 Wounded in Canadian School Shooting, Shooter Identified
The media's favorite deflection is pointing to raw numbers. Males carry out most mass shootings, they'll say. Men are heavily overrepresented among mass shooters. That makes women vastly underrepresented. The problem is men! And white men in particular! Trans-identifying people account for only a small percentage of mass shooters. Case closed, right? Wrong. That's a deliberately misleading statistic designed to obscure the truth.
But evidence has never stopped the media from spinning fiction.
Here are the facts. Trans-identifying people represent less than 1% of the population. It would be statistically improbable for them to be responsible for most mass shootings. The real question isn’t whether trans people commit most mass shootings. The question is whether they commit such acts disproportionately relative to their share of the population. The answer is yes.
When I crunched the numbers, I found that 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. Trans-identifying people commit mass shootings at more than three times their population share, exceeding even the disproportionate rate of men.
Yes, men make up roughly 98% of all mass shooters despite being half the population, while women account for only about 2.3% despite also being roughly half the population. The math tells us that makes trans people disproportionately represented among mass shooters relative to their tiny slice of the population. This is a mental health problem we’re dealing with, not a gun control problem.
Naturally, I think we all expect Canada to take this tragedy and see guns as the problem, and try to “fix” it with even more gun control, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that mental health problems are not being treated as such, particularly with gender-confused people who are convinced they’re in the wrong body.
