Wednesday brought a horrific start to the American school year: another mass shooting.
The shooter killed two school-age children and wounded 17 others at a Catholic church in Minneapolis before killing herself. Conservatives almost immediately seized upon one key detail about the shooter: The fact that she appeared to be transgender. Court records reported by the New York Times state that the shooter "identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification." Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also said in a post on X the shooter was trans.
Perhaps predictably, right-wingers immediately began claiming that the shooter's identity was both somehow behind her decision to carry out this act of horrific violence and proof that trans people are violent more broadly. But as my colleague Abby Vesoulis explains in a new piece just published, this is not just another example of a baseless take meant to pathologize trans people—it's also bad math:
The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings in which four or more people (not including the shooter) are shot or killed, estimated last year that fewer than 1 percent of the shootings it reviewed in the last decade were carried out by trans individuals. Mother Jones has its own database tracking shootings in which “three or more victims were killed in an indiscriminate public rampage. As I wrote in 2023, very, very few of those were carried out by individuals who were not cisgender men...
That doesn’t mean transgender people are never responsible for these acts. There are, unfortunately, many preventable deaths caused by gun violence in the US; trans people make up a very small proportion of the US population, and they make up a similarly small proportion of gun-violence perpetrators.
Make sure to check out Abby's full piece.
—Julianne McShane
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