In the wake of last week’s deadly shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, the Trump administration is considering something uncharacteristic: more gun control.
The catch? It would only apply to transgender people.
On Thursday, multiple media outlets reported that the U.S. Department of Justice is considering banning trans people from owning guns, most likely by declaring gender dysphoria to be a serious mental illness that outweighs their Second Amendment rights.
The ostensible spark is the fact that Robin Westman, the 23-year-old former student who killed two children and injured 18 more, was transgender, reportedly writing in their diary that they were “tired of being trans”.
But it’s also the culmination of a years-long effort by conservatives, including Republican politicians, to smear America’s estimated 2.8 million trans people as exceptionally violent, unstable, and prone to perpetrating mass shootings.
“Just as with the transgender attack on the Nashville Christian School… there is an ideological connection to multiple of these attacks where innocent children, especially Christians and Catholics, are targeted. And that is very, very disturbing,” Trump’s counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka said in an interview with CNN.
“The trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder. The pattern is undeniable,” wrote conservative commentator and noted plagiarist Benny Johnson.
“If they are willing to destroy themselves and how God made them then they are willing to destroy others, and we saw that happen today,” wrote far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
These kinds of statements have become routine after prominent mass shootings. Year after year, GOP figures including Taylor-Greene, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump Jr have repeatedly embraced or boosted false claims that the perpetrators were trans.
Gorka has even said that the Trump administration’s new counterterrorism plan will “address the issue” of ‘transgender domestic terrorism’.
The idea that trans people are disproportionately violent flies in the face of most available evidence, and Republicans have shown no interest in policing other identities or ideologies that actually are correlated with mass shootings
Instead, the ‘trans mass shooters’ narrative seems to be a naked attempt to vilify a vulnerable minority as murderers and terrorists, in the hope of building support for the Republican Party’s broad-spectrum assault on trans rights.
What does the evidence say?
Officials described the DoJ’s discussions as being in the early stages, and it’s not exactly clear how many people it would apply to.
While being transgender in itself is not classified as a mental disorder, trans people usually need to be diagnosed with a condition known as gender dysphoria, or gender identity disorder, so they can access healthcare.
Under federal law, a judge must determine whether a person is mentally “defective” or “committed to a mental institution” before they can be stripped of their right to own firearms. That’s a higher standard than merely being mentally ill.
Meanwhile, estimates of mass shootings in the U.S. and the demographics of the shooters vary widely. Different researchers have different definitions of ‘mass shooting’, while a person’s trans identity is often hidden or unclear.
A 2023 study by the Secret Service [PDF link] found that 2 percent of mass shooters were transgender, which is higher than the estimated 1 percent of the U.S. population who identify as trans or non-binary. However, it only examined 173 attacks by 180 perpetrators.
Conversely, the non-profit Gun Violence Archive — which counts any shooting that killed four or more people, excluding the shooter — has logged 5,729 such incidents since 2013. Of those, only eight perpetrators (or 0.14 percent) are thought to have been trans.
Using a more stringent definition, the non-profit Violent Prevention Project counts 195 mass shootings since 1970, with only one perpetrator listed as trans.
Even if trans people were over-represented in mass shooting statistics, that alone wouldn’t justify restricting gender transition.
The vast majority of perpetrators are cisgender (or non-trans) men — up to 98 per cent, according to the Violence Prevention Project. But you don’t see American politicians calling for all men to be forcibly feminized.
‘We don’t think tr***ies should have guns’
That raises a wider point, too. Robin Westman’s trans identity is well-documented, albeit complicated. “I am tired of being trans. I wish I never brainwashed myself,” they reportedly wrote in their diary.
“I know I am not a woman, but I definitely don’t feel like a man… don’t let your kids smoke weed or change gender until they are like seventeen.”
At the same time, there’s evidence that Westman was in thrall to far-right ideology. Classmates have said Westman gave Nazi salutes and was obsessed with school shooters, while their journal was reportedly full of racist slurs and statements.
Alternatively, some experts contend that Westman is yet another example of “nihilistic violent extremism” — a growing online subculture that holds human existence to be entirely meaningless and valorizes “killing for killing’s sake”, with individuals striving to emulate and outdo the body counts of past shooters.
“The message is there is no message,” Westman allegedly wrote.
That same Secret Service report found that one quarter of attackers subscribed to “conspiratorial or hate-focused belief systems”, including “antisemitism, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Asian, misogyny, and race-based supremacy”.
Multiple studies and reports have described far-right extremism as a major driver of domestic terrorism, and repeatedly found it to be the most common ideology behind such attacks.
Yet that does not appear to trouble the Trump administration. Quite the opposite: it has hired numerous people with histories of or ties to far-right extremism, allegedly including Gorka himself (though he has denied it), while also pardoning Jan 6 rioters convicted of seditious conspiracy.
By contrast, treating trans people as potential terrorists is wholly in line with the Trump administration’s war on trans life. Officials are attempting to erase federal recognition of trans people, restrict transition healthcare, ban trans athletes, and force thousands of trans service members out of all branches of the military.
Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, has even suggested he will investigate potential links between trans hormone therapy and violent behavior. Elon Musk has likewise called for such treatments to be banned, claiming they are “driving extreme violence”. Neither offered any evidence.
Official statements about a potential trans gun ban have been vague. “The DoJ is actively evaluating options to prevent the pattern of violence we have seen from individuals with specific mental health challenges and substance abuse disorders. No specific criminal justice proposals have been advanced at this time,” a spokesperson told The Independent.
But perhaps a better understanding of the true motives of this mooted crackdown can be found in the words of an unnamed DoJ official quoted by Daily Wire reporter Mary Margaret Olahan on Thursday.
“We’re not playing semantics with words like dysphoria,” the official reportedly said. “We’re talking about tr***ies, and we don’t think they should have guns.”
