Mass Shooters Are Not Disproportionately Transgender

The suspect in the mass shooting responsible for killing two school-aged children and wounding 17 others at a Catholic church in Minneapolis on Wednesday has been identified as having changed her legal name in 2020 to reflect her identity as female.

“Minor child identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” a judge wrote in court records reported by the New York Times.

Predictably, voices on the far right have immediately seized on that tidbit, blaming the suspect’s gender identity for the shooting. “Today’s evil church school shooter was a trans who was likely groomed and transitioned as a teenager,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted on X. “Congress MUST PASS my bill Protecting Children’s Innocence Act to make it a FELONY to perform sex change surgeries and all forms of medications on minors!!!”

“One thing is VERY clear: the trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder,” wrote conservative YouTube host Benny Johnson. “The pattern is undeniable.”

Just one day after the horrific event, it isn’t yet possible to conclude why the suspected killer choose to do what she did. 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.

Rather, multiple independent databases tracking mass shootings confirm the opposite: 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.

“From a statistical basis,” I wrote, “transgender individuals are much more prone to being the victims of violence than they are likely to commit it.”

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.