Mass Shooters Are Not Disproportionately Transgender
Most mass shootings are carried out by cisgender men.
Most mass shootings are carried out by cisgender men.
www.motherjones.com
"... 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.
One hundred and thirty four of the 141 mass shootings tracked by
Mother Jones since 1982 were carried out by men with no known history of identifying as trans or nonbinary. Two were carried out by women believed to be cisgender. Two more were carried out by a man and a woman, also believed to be cisgender, working together.
... 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.
But to blame the unnerving prevalence of mass shootings in America on the existence of trans people here isn’t just a dangerously stigmatizing, politically motivated take. It’s also bad math."
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Again, the assailant's weapons were covered in references to other mass murderers, a threat to kill Trump, to neonazi and antisemitic ideas and general hatred. A lot of mass murderers claim the same influences and ideation and most of them are cisgender men. That does not mean that cisgender men is a mental illness. The embrace of radical hatred and the will to murder is a societal disease. It is no more logical to scapegoat young cisgender men, even though they ARE disproportionately represented as mass murderers (and also serial killers), than transgender people.
But too many on the right want to escape any introspection about this particular tragedy, which they usually do by leaning into "it's too soon to talk about it / don't politicize it / thoughts and prayers", here by focusing not on the killer's scrawled targets and sources of hatred, but instead on claiming the fact that there are a handful of transgender mass shooters among hundreds of mass shootings (even when you eliminate domestic and street violence to focus on a "public rampage") means all transgender people are mentally ill threats to society prone to become the next Buffalo Bill at any moment. Scapegoating as deflection, targeting a small minority and already among the most targeted and weakest among us as the cause of something that has happened 141 times since 1982, including twice perpetrated by a person who identified as transgender.
