FACT CHECK: Mass casualty shootings perpetrated by someone identifying as trans or nonbinary are rare, and in fact, those groups are far more likely to be the victims of violence
Moments after the assailant who killed six people at a Nashville private school was identified as transgender, a baseless narrative emerged: that there has been an incredible rise in transgender or nonbinary mass shooters in recent years.
CLAIM: Four recent shootings show there has been an “incredible rise” in transgender or nonbinary mass shooters in the past few years, making the group “by far the largest group committing as a percentage of the population.” In making the claim, social media users are citing four examples over the past five years in which the assailant in a shooting identified as trans or nonbinary: the November killing of five at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado; a 2019 shooting at a Denver-area school by two shooters, one of them a trans man, that left one student dead and eight wounded; a 2018 shooting at a Maryland warehouse that left four dead, including the shooter; and the shooting Monday in Nashville.
Laura Dugan, a professor of human security and sociology at Ohio State University, said the four widely cited examples out of the 3,561 shootings translates to 0.11% being perpetrated by someone who is not cisgender — a very low number relative to the number of mass shootings total.Dugan also pointed out that there are some doubts about the nonbinary identity asserted by the Colorado Springs shooter.
Olivera Jokić, the director of the gender studies program at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, referred to a National Institutes of Justice database that tracked U.S. mass shootings — defined as a shooting that kills four or more people — from 1966 to 2019. The research found that of the 172 people who committed public mass shootings covered in the database, 97.7% were male. The data makes no distinction between transgender and cisgender perpetrators.
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