Q: Have many of the mass shooters been transgender? A: The number of transgender mass shooters in the U.S. varies depending on how “mass shooting” is defined, but is relatively small. The Gun Violence Archive, which uses a broader definition, lists five mass shootings by transgender or...
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The
Gun Violence Archive, an independent organization that tracks gun-related violence in the U.S.,
defines mass shootings as incidents in which there are “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident.” Under this standard, there were 5,748 mass shootings between Jan. 1, 2013, and Sept. 15, 2025, according to the GVA. “OF THAT NUMBER OF INCIDENTS, there have been FIVE CONFIRMED Transgender shooters,”
Mark Bryant, the GVA’s founding executive director, told us in an email.
The
five mass shootings in the GVA’s database with a transgender shooting suspect are the August shooting in Minneapolis, the March 2023 shooting at a school in Nashville, the November 2022 shooting at a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the May 2019 shooting at a school in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and the September 2018 shooting at a warehouse in Aberdeen, Maryland. However,
Anderson Lee Aldrich, the convicted shooter in Colorado Springs, identified as nonbinary,
according to Aldrich’s lawyer. A transgender individual identifies with a gender that does not match their sex assigned at birth, while a nonbinary individual identifies as neither exclusively male nor female. While many nonbinary individuals identify as transgender,
not all do, the Human Rights Campaign says.
. . .
Overall, Bryant said the number of transgender mass shooters could be as high as eight, if some individuals whose gender identity hasn’t yet been verified are included. That would still mean that transgender individuals were responsible for less than 0.1% of mass shootings in the last 12 years, according to the GVA. (It would be less than 0.2% of incidents from 2018 until now.)