By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Private Policy and Terms of Use.
In the wake of a tragic mass shooting in Iowa, conservatives and far-right extremists have falsely peddled the claim that the LGBTQ+ community is dangerous, but data refutes that claim.
A shooting at an Iowa school just days after the start of 2024 that left a sixth-grade child dead, four other students, and an administrator injured has ignited discussions on mass shootings and the gender identity of perpetrators of this type of violence. Even before police identified the shooter, far-right influencers online began pushing a narrative that the 17-year-old Perry High School student was a member of the LGBTQ+ community based on a Pride flag on one social media profile and a reference to genderfluid in a post. Others, including Elon Musk, amplified the false notion that transgender and nonbinary people pose a significant risk to the population regarding mass shootings—they don’t.
Related: Right-wing influencers seem happy that Iowa school shooter might be LGBTQ+
Charlotte Clymer, a prominent trans writer and activist, has provided a breakdown the of the stats on Threads, challenging some narratives propagated in right-wing media.
According to Clymer, if the Iowa shooter were transgender, this would represent an exceedingly small proportion of mass shooters; out of 4,684 mass shootings documented by the Gun Violence Archive since 2014, at most six involved transgender individuals. This represents about 0.128 percent of all mass shooters, in stark contrast to the 99.9 percent of mass shootings carried out by non-trans individuals, Clymer noted.
Based on a 2022 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, a renowned authority on LGBTQ+ data, approximately 0.6 percent of the U.S. population aged 13 and older, totaling 267.8 million people, is identified as part of the transgender community.
Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.
Further insights come from Reuters Fact Check, which clarifies that the majority of mass shooters in the U.S. are cisgender men. This investigation also debunks certain viral claims on social media, pointing out that the few cases often cited (in Nashville, Colorado Springs, Denver, and Aberdeen) do not represent the more significant trend.
Organizations like The Violence Project and the Gun Violence Archive support the statistics on mass shootings. These groups emphasize the rarity of transgender or nonbinary individuals being involved in such incidents. The Gun Violence Archive noted that known transgender suspects in mass shootings account for less than 0.11 percent of all shootings over the last decade. The U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center also found that nearly all attackers in mass casualty attacks were male, with a small fraction being transgender.
Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, cautioned against misusing such tragedies for propagating harmful stereotypes.
"Media outlets that speculate on the shooter's identity or their support of LGBTQ rights instead of focusing on those impacted are contributing to a false and sweeping narrative about vulnerable communities. We all deserve to feel safe when going about our lives, and we need to protect our children most of all. Media outlets and leaders have an obligation to humanize the victims and survivors during this painful time, not to sensationalize the harms of gun violence or bring fame to the shooter," Ellis said in a statement.
Similarly, the Human Rights Campaign has criticized the exploitation of these events to promote anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria. HRC’s national press secretary Brandon Wolf, himself a witness to gun violence in the 2016 Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, highlighted the fact that LGBTQ+ individuals are more often victims of gun violence than perpetrators, challenging the narratives that aim to demonize the community.
Angela Ferell-Zaballa, executive director of Moms Demand Action, warns against accepting false narratives in the wake of gun violence and echoed Wolf's comments about victims of gun violence.
“Extremists often try to muddy the waters by blaming our gun violence crisis on mental health or gender identity, when often people with these lived realities are most likely to be victims of gun violence, rather than perpetrators of it," she said.
Ferell-Zaballa added that the common denominator in these shootings is the gun and the weak laws that allow these tragedies to happen.
