Crime & Justice
Why Does the U.S. Have More Gun Deaths?
Firearm deaths per 100,000 in the U.S. and twelve peers, split into homicide and suicide, and why the gap is a gun gap.
Groups & Crime
Is It True That Trans Women Are More Likely to Be Sex Offenders?
Two infographics traced to their sources, and why neither is a rate. Both numbers fail; the method fails independently.
Groups & Crime
Are LGB People More Likely to Be Sex Offenders?
The three small studies both sides cite, and why a caseload is not a rate.
Are Trans People Overrepresented as Mass Shooters?
This article tests the claim against three mass-shooting databases under each database’s own definition, runs a sensitivity analysis, and checks the Crime Prevention Research Center’s statistical case for the claim against its own data.
Jump to the verdict ↓
Why this is filed as a political fact check
This claim (that trans people are overrepresented as mass shooters) has been used by elected officials and political organizations to justify proposals aimed at the trans community. The data is examined here as a political fact check, not a demographic study.
The short answer
No. About 1 in every 120 people in the US is trans. If trans people were exactly as likely as anyone else to commit a mass shooting, about 1 in every 120 mass shootings would be carried out by a trans person. Of three databases of US mass shootings, only one is big enough to test it, and in that one trans people carried out far fewer than 1 in 120.
That database, the Gun Violence Archive, lists every US shooting since 2013 in which four or more people were shot: 5,748 up to mid-September 2025. One in 120 of them would be about 48. The actual number is four: Alec McKinney and Audrey Hale, confirmed as trans, and Snochia Moseley and Robin Westman, whose trans identity is disputed. Four is 12 times fewer than 48.
The other two databases, the Violence Prevention Project and Mother Jones, list only public shootings in which several people were killed. The Violence Prevention Project holds about 200 of them, and Mother Jones about 150. One in 120 of either number is between one and two, and that is what they hold. Both list Audrey Hale, and Mother Jones also lists Snochia Moseley, whose trans identity is disputed. With numbers this small, one person decides the result. In Mother Jones, trans people come out above their share of the population if Moseley is counted as trans and below it if she is not, and whether she was trans is the part in dispute. So neither list can show a difference in either direction.
A figure circulated to claim trans people are overrepresented comes from a fourth list, kept by John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center, separate from all three above. It uses only that list’s public shootings from 2018 to 2025, about 44 of them. At 1 in 120, you would expect less than one of those to be by a trans person. The Center counts two, which is where its figure of 6.2 times the population share comes from. One of the two is Audrey Hale again. The other is Anderson Lee Aldrich, who killed five people at Club Q in 2022. The claim that Aldrich is nonbinary was made by a defence lawyer after the arrest, with no evidence of it before the shooting, which is why Aldrich is not one of the four counted above. Without Aldrich, the Center’s figure rests on Hale alone, and one person cannot show a pattern.
Ethical note Identity classifications rest on law enforcement statements and records and on court filings where they exist; where they do not, each profile says what its classification rests on. Where sources conflict, the case is labelled “disputed” and kept out of confirmed counts; the exception is Aldrich, whose post-arrest claim this page rejects.
All-Time Overview
| Gun Violence Archive (GVA) | Violence Prevention Project | Mother Jones | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Definition | Broadest. 4+ people shot (injured or killed), not including the shooter. All contexts included. | Strictest. Shootings with 4+ killed, excluding the shooter, in a public place with no connection to underlying criminal activity such as gangs or drugs. | Strictest. Indiscriminate public shootings with 4+ killed before 2013 and 3+ from January 2013; excludes gang violence, armed robbery and domestic disputes in private homes. |
| Coverage | 2013 — Sep 2025 | through 2025 | 1982–2025 |
| Total mass shootings | 5,748 (to 15 September 2025) | 198 (1966 to August 2025), by 202 shooters | 155 (1982 to August 2025) |
| Trans shooters | Counted here: 4, McKinney and Hale (confirmed), Moseley and Westman (disputed). GVA’s own count: 5, as of September 2025; GVA includes Aldrich, whom this page does not count | Confirmed: 1, Audrey Hale only | Confirmed: 1, Audrey Hale. Disputed, kept in as for GVA: 1, Snochia Moseley (Aberdeen, Maryland, 2018) |
| Trans share of incidents | 0.07% | 0.51% | 1.29% (2 of 155); 0.65% on Hale alone |
| Trans share of US population | ~0.84% of the total US population (the Williams Institute’s 2.86M over the Census total of 341.8M) | ||
| Verdict | UNDERREPRESENTED ~12× by share of incidents | ONE CASE: TOO FEW TO MEASURE (~1.7× under by share) | TWO CASES, ONE DISPUTED: TOO FEW TO MEASURE |
Trans Share of Mass Shootings vs. Trans Share of Population
How to read it: all-time data; each pair of bars sets the share of one database’s mass shootings carried out by someone identified as trans against the trans share of the total US population (0.84%, the Williams Institute’s 2.86M over the Census total of 341.8M), so a shorter first bar means trans people are a smaller share of mass shootings than of people. GVA’s 0.07% counts four people, two confirmed as trans and two disputed. The Violence Prevention Project’s 0.51% is one confirmed case, Audrey Hale. Mother Jones is shown both ways: 1.29% counting the 2018 shooting by Snochia Moseley, whose trans identity is disputed, the way the GVA bar counts its two disputed shooters, and 0.65% on Hale alone.
Mother Jones appears twice because it is disputed whether the shooter in its second case, Snochia Moseley, was trans. Counting it puts the trans share above the population share; leaving it out puts it below. The Violence Prevention Project’s bar would cross the line the same way with one case more. When one person decides which side of the line a database falls on, it cannot show a pattern in either direction, so neither strict database is a finding; only the Gun Violence Archive has enough cases to measure.
Mass Shooting Incidents per 100,000 People, Trans vs. General Population (GVA, All-Time)
How to read it: each bar is mass shooting incidents per 100,000 people in that group, not shooters (0.14 for trans people, 1.98 for the general population), about 14 times fewer for trans people; a shorter bar means fewer shootings per person. Trans population 2.8M (aged 13 and older, Williams Institute 2025); U.S. population aged 13 and older ~290M (Census Vintage 2025; see the note on denominators in Part 4).
This page keeps Moseley and Westman, whom it rates as disputed, in the numerator, because keeping doubtful cases in makes the gap smaller and is the conservative direction for the conclusion drawn here. On GVA’s own count of five the gap would be about 11 times rather than 14. Every comparison on this page sets a count of people against a count of incidents. It is a real weakness, and it affects every multiple quoted here. Some of GVA’s 5,748 mass shootings had more than one shooter, but GVA publishes no count of shooters across its mass shootings, so the corrected figure cannot be given here. Three of the four trans cases had one shooter, so for those the general population count is the one that would rise, and the gap would be wider than the 14 times shown. Against that, the fourth, the 2019 STEM School shooting, had two shooters, of whom this page counts only McKinney as trans, so counting that row as a trans incident slightly overstates the trans share. That affects one row, while the extra shooters affect the whole denominator, a much larger effect, so the real underrepresentation is larger than the figures shown.
| Shooter | Identity | Record |
|---|---|---|
| Snochia Moseley‼ DISPUTED | Reported as a trans man on the strength of Facebook messages that a close friend, Troi Coley, shared with the Baltimore Sun. In messages she said were sent in December 2016, Moseley described identifying as a trans man. No law enforcement record, court document, or official statement confirms trans identity; the Harford County sheriff described the shooter as female. | Moseley died in hospital of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on the day of the shooting. Three were killed, enough for Mother Jones but not for the Violence Prevention Project, which needs four or more. |
| Alec McKinney✓ CONFIRMED TRANS | Trans boy. Confirmed by the probable cause affidavit, which records him telling investigators he was born female and was transitioning. | Targeted specific students who bullied him for being trans. One of TWO shooters. The other, Devon Erickson, fired the shot that killed Kendrick Castillo, prosecutors said; the same affidavit records McKinney as the one who planned the attack. Pleaded guilty in February 2020 and was sentenced to life with parole eligibility after 40 years. GVA, YES. Strict, NO (one killed; the strict databases need three or four). |
| Anderson Lee Aldrich✕ CLAIM REJECTED, NOT COUNTED | Claimed nonbinary through a defence lawyer after arrest. The district attorney who prosecuted the state case said there was no evidence of a nonbinary identity before the shooting and called the claim an attempt to avoid hate crime charges. The Associated Press found no sign, in Aldrich’s known social media or dealings with others, that Aldrich publicly identified as nonbinary before the shooting. This page does not count Aldrich as transgender in any figure of its own. | Pleaded guilty in Colorado in June 2023 to five counts of first-degree murder and 46 of attempted murder, and no contest to two counts of bias-motivated crime; pleaded guilty in federal court in June 2024 to 74 counts, 50 of them hate crimes, admitting the attack targeted victims for their actual or perceived gender identity or sexual orientation, and received 55 concurrent life terms plus 190 years. |
| Audrey Hale✓ CONFIRMED TRANS | Trans man. Confirmed by the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD), whose final report records that Hale had begun using male pronouns and the name Aiden Williams; it found nothing, medical records included, to suggest Hale had started or was undergoing a transition at the time of death. | MNPD closed its investigation in April 2025 and found the motive was notoriety. MNPD names neither politics nor gender identity as a motive. |
| Dylan Butler✕ NEVER CONFIRMED | Gender identity was never confirmed by any law enforcement agency, which did not comment on it at all. The evidence is screenshots of social media accounts, taken down by the next day, showing rainbow and trans flag emojis, he/they pronouns and a genderfluid hashtag. | Died by suicide at the scene. |
| Robin Westman‼ DISPUTED | Assigned male at birth. A court granted a name change from Robert to Robin in January 2020, when Westman was 17, in an order recording that the minor “identifies as a female.” Five and a half years later, the journal Westman posted before the attack said, in the New York Post’s translation, “I regret being trans”, and how Westman identified on the day is not clear. WIRED found no public evidence that Westman consistently identified as transgender, “making classification uncertain”. | The FBI called it an act of domestic terrorism motivated by a hate-filled ideology and a hate crime targeting Catholics. Extremism analysts who reviewed the same material told NPR that the writings showed no coherent ideological motive. |
| Jesse Van RootselaarCANADA, NOT US DATA | Trans woman. Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald said she was born male, began transitioning about six years earlier and identified as female socially and publicly. | No confirmed motive. Police said they had found no note or other communication and no sign she was bullied at school. This is a CANADIAN shooting, in no US database and irrelevant to US statistics. |
| Robert Dorgan (Roberta Esposito)⊘ DOMESTIC SHOOTING | Trans woman. Police identified the shooter as Robert Dorgan and said she also went by Roberta Esposito. In a 2020 police complaint written in her own words she refers to recent gender reassignment surgery. | Shot five people from her own family circle in the stands at a high school hockey game; her ex-wife and their adult son died, and her ex-wife's father died of his injuries nine days later. Police called it a targeted attack that may have come from a family dispute. It meets GVA's four-shot threshold but not the Violence Prevention Project's four or more killed; the GVA and Mother Jones counts on this page stop in 2025, before it. |
Part 1 Sources
Gun Violence Archive — Mass Shooting Methodology and Reasoning (the definition, and what it knows of shooters) — gunviolencearchive.org/explainer
The Violence Prevention Project — Mass Shooter Database, Version 10 (January 2026): 198 mass shootings by 202 shooters from 1966 to August 2025, one shooter coded transgender; the definition is in its FAQ — theviolenceproject.org
Mother Jones — "US Mass Shootings, 1982–2026: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation" (155 cases from 1982 to August 2025; the Minneapolis shooting excluded), and "A Guide to Mass Shootings in America" (the definition) — motherjones.com · the guide
FactCheck.org — "Few Mass Shooters Have Been Transgender" — factcheck.org
Nashville Banner — Covenant School MNPD report — nashvillebanner.com
Metro Nashville Police Department — "MNPD Concludes Covenant School Mass Murder Investigation", 2 April 2025, with its final summary report — nashville.gov · report (PDF)
ABC News — Club Q mass shooter sentenced to life in prison on federal hate crime charges, 18 June 2024 (74 federal counts, 55 concurrent life sentences plus 190 years; state plea of June 2023) — abcnews.com
CNN, via KVIA — "'There is no message': Journal details warning signs, violent obsessions of Minneapolis shooter", 28 August 2025 — kvia.com
NPR — "'There is no message': The search for ideological motives in the Minneapolis shooting", 29 August 2025 — npr.org
Newsweek — "Dylan Butler Transgender Claims Flood Social Media" — newsweek.com
Williams Institute — New estimate: 2.8 million people aged 13 and older identify as transgender in the US, 20 August 2025, 1.0% of that age group — williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu
GLAAD — "Fact Sheet: Debunking 'Trans Terrorism' and Other False Claims in High-Profile Crimes", 15 September 2025 (GVA’s five confirmed transgender shooters among 5,748 mass shootings, 1 January 2013 to 15 September 2025) — glaad.org
CNN, via KRDO — the second STEM School shooter sentenced, 17 September 2021 (two shooters) — krdo.com
Baltimore Sun — "What we know about Snochia Moseley, alleged shooter at Maryland Rite Aid warehouse", 21 September 2018 (the Facebook messages a friend, Troi Coley, shared; authorities and court records identified Moseley as female) — baltimoresun.com
ABC News — "4 killed, including shooter, at Maryland Rite Aid facility", 20 September 2018 (the Harford County sheriff on the 26-year-old female suspect’s death) — abcnews.com
CNN — "Man convicted of killing student in Colorado STEM school shooting", 15 June 2021 (McKinney, in the probable cause affidavit, born female and transitioning, targeting students who called him “disgusting”) — cnn.com
Denver7 — "Affidavit: Juvenile suspect planned STEM School shooting, threatened other suspect", 20 June 2019 — denver7.com
The Colorado Sun — "STEM School Highlands Ranch shooter sentenced to life in prison after emotional, day-long hearing", 24 July 2020 (the February plea; life with parole possible after 40 years) — coloradosun.com
Associated Press, via KSL — "Former student guilty of murder in Colorado school shooting", 15 June 2021 (the prosecution’s case on Kendrick Castillo’s death) — ksl.com
Associated Press, via WSLS — "Explainer: Pronouns, nonbinary people and the Club Q attack", 8 December 2022 — wsls.com
NBC News — "Musk, Trump Jr., far-right figures seize on Iowa shooter’s possible LGBTQ identity", 5 January 2024 (the screenshots, since taken down; authorities’ silence on gender identity) — nbcnews.com
Iowa Department of Public Safety — "Update to the Perry High School shooting investigation", 5 January 2024 (Butler’s death ruled a suicide) — dps.iowa.gov
NBC News — "What we know as Robin Westman is identified as shooting suspect after Minneapolis Catholic school attack", 27 August 2025 (the name change granted in January 2020, when Westman was 17) — nbcnews.com
New York Post — "Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman confessed he was ‘tired of being trans’", 28 August 2025 (its translation of the journal) — nypost.com
The Hill, via Yahoo — "FBI investigating Minnesota school shooting as hate crime against Catholics", 27 August 2025 — yahoo.com
FOX 9 — "Annunciation mass shooting: What we know about the shooter’s motive", 28 August 2025 (the FBI director: evidence “demonstrating this was an act of domestic terrorism motivated by a hate-filled ideology”) — fox9.com
Global News — "Tumbler Ridge shooting: Everything RCMP has said about the shooter so far", 11 February 2026 (Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald’s statements) — globalnews.ca
Associated Press, via Yahoo — "Shooting at Rhode Island youth hockey game leaves 3 dead, including shooter, and 3 more wounded", 16 February 2026 (the police chief on the shooter’s names and a targeted event) — yahoo.com
Associated Press, via PBS — "Third victim dies from wounds suffered in Rhode Island ice rink shooting, police say", 26 February 2026 (the victims) — pbs.org
Boston 25 News, via Yahoo — "Pawtucket ice rink shooting suspect had family disputes due to gender identity, court documents show", 17 February 2026 (the 2020 police complaint) — yahoo.com
Boston 25 News, via Yahoo — "Third victim dies following Pawtucket hockey rink shooting, police say", 26 February 2026 (nine days after he was shot) — yahoo.com
Download this conclusion: the strict definition
Under the strict definitions, public shootings with three or four or more killed, each database holds one confirmed case, and the overrepresentation claim rests on a start year and a post-arrest claim.
The Six Years From 2020 to 2025
All three political responses in this section came in the weeks after the Minneapolis church shooting of 27 August 2025, two of them after the killing of Charlie Kirk on 10 September, whose accused killer is not transgender. This section counts GVA's mass shootings for the six years that end with them, 2020 to 2025.
GVA — 2020–2025 Window Only
Trans shooters counted here2, Hale (confirmed) and Westman (disputed)
GVA’s own list for this window3, because GVA includes Aldrich (Club Q, 2022), whom this page does not count; on GVA’s three the gap is about 11 times per capita.
Per capita (this page’s count)0.071 GVA mass shooting incidents per 100,000 trans people aged 13 and older (2 over 2.8M) against 1.21 for the general population aged 13 and older (3,515 over ~290M), about 17 times fewer
The Heritage Foundation, 2025
With its spin-off, the Oversight Project, called on the FBI in September 2025 to designate "Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism" as a domestic terror threat. The case the two groups published for it claimed that "Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology." Wired checked the figure and wrote that the claim was "not just unsupported, it appears misleading by design." Asked by Wired for a source, Heritage pointed to a post by one of its own vice-presidents, Roger Severino, listing eight shootings.
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Newsmax, 16 September 2025
Called for getting trans people "off the streets" and "off the internet."
Trump DOJ, September 2025
Senior officials discussed barring trans people from owning guns after the Minneapolis shooting, according to a person familiar with the talks. The department said it was "actively evaluating options" and that no specific proposal had been advanced.
Part 2 Additional Sources
GVA Annual Totals — gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls
Talking Points Memo, via Yahoo — "Texas Congressman Says Trans People Need To Be Taken ‘Off The Streets’ After Charlie Kirk Shooting", 17 September 2025 (Rep. Ronny Jackson’s words on Newsmax on the evening of 16 September 2025) — yahoo.com
Associated Press, via the Bangor Daily News — "Justice Department talks about banning transgender gun owners spark fury across political spectrum", 5 September 2025 (the talks, attributed to a person familiar with the matter; the department’s statement) — bangordailynews.com
Wired — Dell Cameron and Andrew Couts, "Heritage Foundation Uses Bogus Stat to Push a Trans Terrorism Classification", 26 September 2025 — wired.com
The Oversight Project — its case for a new FBI domestic terrorism designation, 22 September 2025 — itsyourgov.org
HuffPost — Pocharapon Neammanee, "GOP Lawmaker Makes Shocking Call To Take Trans People ‘Off The Streets’", 17 September 2025 (the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, is not transgender) — huffpost.com
NPR — "Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk fatally shot at speaking event in Utah", 10 September 2025 — npr.org
Population Data & Sensitivity Analysis
Where the 2.8 million figure comes from
The Real Trans Population (Williams Institute, August 2025)
Parts 1 and 2 use 2.8 million as the trans population denominator: the full Williams Institute (August 2025) estimate. If minors like McKinney (age 16) are in the numerator, youth must be in the denominator. A binary-only figure, 1.87M, estimated here by applying the adult binary share (66.9%) to all 2.8 million because the Williams Institute gives no gender breakdown for youth, shrinks the underrepresentation multiplier from ~14× to ~9.3× all-time, and from ~17× to ~11× (11.3) for 2020 to 2025. The narrowest possible figure (binary adults only, 1,429,000) shrinks it to ~7×, while still counting McKinney in the numerator, which errs against this page’s conclusion.
Trans women698,500
Trans men730,500
Nonbinary trans adults707,100
Trans youth (13–17)~724,000
Total trans population (US, aged 13 and older)over 2,800,000
Per 100,000 people aged 13 and older, on the full 2.8 million, the trans rate is 7% of the general-population rate on the Gun Violence Archive, 52% on the Violence Prevention Project, and 134% on Mother Jones counting Moseley, whose trans identity is disputed, or 67% without her. The last three rest on one or two cases each, too few to compare as rates.
Part 3 Sources
Williams Institute — Population estimates, August 2025: 2.8 million aged 13 and older, of whom 2.1 million are adults and 724,000 are aged 13 to 17 — williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu
Williams Institute — Herman and Flores, "How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States?", August 2025 (the gender breakdown for adults; none is given for youth) — williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu
U.S. Census Bureau — Vintage 2025 population estimates, 341,784,857 at 1 July 2025 (press release 27 January 2026), and the estimates by single year of age for July 2025 (50,608,394 under 13; 291,176,463 aged 13 and older) — census.gov · single-year-of-age table (XLSX)
NBC News — on the Williams Institute’s 2.8 million estimate, August 2025 — nbcnews.com
Limitations, Counterarguments & Sensitivity Analysis
Every per-capita figure in this analysis is calculated from 1 to 6 events spread across a population of 1.4–2.8 million people and, depending on the database, a few dozen to several thousand mass shootings. The 95% confidence interval on the underlying all-time GVA rate is roughly 0.02% to 0.18%. The direction (underrepresentation) is clear across every calculation with enough cases to measure; the exact magnitude has wide error bars and should not be treated as a precise figure.
Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) / John Lott
The Claim
Counting mass public shootings as CPRC defines them from FBI criteria (four or more murdered in a public place, with no other crime such as a gang fight or robbery), John Lott and the CPRC put the trans share of such shootings from 2018 to 2025 at 6.2 times the trans share of the population. Using the FBI’s broader “active shooter” reports for 2018 to 2024, they count 7 of 284 attacks (2.5%) as committed by trans people, 3.4 times their population share, and 3 of 25 attacks (12%) in 2024 alone, 12 to 16 times.
Their Method
Share of attacks divided by share of population. The population share is 0.73%, an average of three adult estimates (Centers for Disease Control surveys 2017–2020 at 0.5%, Gallup 2021 at 0.7%, Census 2023 at 1%). At a 1% share, the Census figure, which the Williams Institute’s 2025 estimate matches, CPRC puts the active-shooter multiple at 2.5 instead of 3.4, and the same adjustment would take the mass public 6.2 to about 4.5; CPRC argues that allowing for the shooters’ youth puts the right share at 0.65% or 0.76%, close to its 0.73%. The mass public shooting numerator for 2018 to 2025 is two people, Hale and Aldrich, out of roughly 44 attacks. The active-shooter numerator of seven is Hale, Aldrich, McKinney, Moseley, Dylan Butler, Genesse Moreno (the 2024 Lakewood Church shooter) and Thomas Crooks, the Butler, Pennsylvania rally shooter.
Issue 1
The numerator. Of CPRC’s seven active shooters, Butler was never confirmed by any agency, Aldrich’s nonbinary identity was asserted by a defence lawyer after arrest, Moreno is a case CPRC itself calls debatable, and Crooks rests on a New York Post report, citing unnamed sources, of a they/them pronoun field on an online profile linked to him, in a story that said it was not clear whether he identified as transgender. By CPRC’s own sensitivity check, at a 1% population share, dropping Moreno alone takes its 2018–2024 result past the conventional 5% threshold of significance. Dropping Butler and Crooks as well leaves four of 284, 1.4% against 1%, a result with roughly a one-in-three chance of arising by luck. On the two this page treats as confirmed, Hale and McKinney, the share is 0.7%, below the population share; adding Moseley, whom this page counts as disputed in its GVA figures, gives three of 284, 1.1%, about the same as a 1% share.
Issue 2
The window. The overrepresentation appears in a series that starts in 2018, the year of the first case on CPRC’s active-shooter list. Over the full run of the same kind of database it shrinks or disappears: the Violence Prevention Project’s 202 shooters from 1966 to 2025 include one it codes as transgender, 0.5%, no higher than any estimate of the population share, and CPRC’s own mass public shooting series from 1998 has about 108 attacks, of which its two trans cases are 1.9%, about twice a 1% population share rather than six times.
Issue 3
Counting. The 6.2 figure is two people out of about 44 attacks, and one of the two is Aldrich, whose nonbinary identity was announced by a defence lawyer after arrest and was rejected by the district attorney who prosecuted the state case and by people who knew Aldrich, and doubted by extremism researchers. Without Aldrich the numerator is one person. At a 1% population share the expected number of trans shooters in 44 attacks is 0.44, and chance alone produces one or more such cases about 36% of the time.
Issue 4
The definition. CPRC’s answer to the Gun Violence Archive figures is that GVA counts gang fights and robberies that differ in motive from an attack meant to kill as many people as possible for publicity. That is a fair point about mixing unlike events. It also concedes the scope of the claim: on mass shootings as a whole, the only category with enough trans cases to measure, trans people are underrepresented twelve to fourteen times over, so “trans people are overrepresented as mass shooters” can only mean a sub-category whose trans count, once Aldrich’s claim is set aside, is one person.
What Remains
Lott’s strongest legitimate point is that under the strict public-shooting definition, counted from 2018, and with Aldrich counted as trans, the trans share of attacks exceeds the trans share of the population, at a 1% population share as well as at 0.73%. The data do not support the weight placed on it.
A chart titled “Mass Shooting Rates by Demographic (2015–2025)” spread on X after the Minneapolis church shooting in August 2025. It claims trans and nonbinary people carry out mass shootings at a higher rate than any other group, counting public shootings in which four or more people were killed. Snopes rates it false, and Lead Stories calls it made-up data.
The two trans bars rest on two shootings. The chart’s maker later said his data held 32 shooters over those ten years, and only two of them were trans or nonbinary. He split those two into two bars, so each bar is one person. Trans people are a small group, about one American in 120, so a single shooting is enough to put their bar at the top of the chart. Take that one shooting away and the bar is zero.
One of the two was not trans. The top bar, labelled “biological male”, is Anderson Lee Aldrich, who shot five people dead at Club Q in Colorado Springs in 2022. Aldrich was called nonbinary by a defence lawyer after the arrest, with no sign of it before the shooting, and the Violence Prevention Project lists Aldrich as a man who is not trans. Without Aldrich, the top bar is zero. The other bar can only be Audrey Hale, the one trans shooter in the Violence Prevention Project’s records for those years.
It lumps trans people together. All trans people, of every race, go into one bar, while everyone else is split into small groups such as Asian men or Hispanic men. Split trans people the same way and, as Snopes points out, the Black, Asian and Hispanic trans bars would all be zero, the lowest on the chart.
It does not match its own numbers. The chart names no source and shows no counts, and the Gun Violence Archive’s founding director told Lead Stories he had “no clue where their numbers come from.” Even the bars are drawn wrong: the Black men bar, 0.198, is drawn two-thirds as long as the top bar, 0.769, when it should be about a quarter as long.
Download this conclusion: the circulating chart
Sensitivity Analysis
The circulating chart and the reasons it fails, in one image to post in reply to it.
| Shooter count assumption | Binary 1.87M: trans rate/100k, vs. general pop | Full 2.8M: trans rate/100k, vs. general pop | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| This page’s four: Moseley, McKinney, Hale, Westman (4) | 0.21, 9.3× lower | 0.14, 13.9× lower | UNDER |
| + Butler, never confirmed (5) | 0.27, 7.4× lower | 0.18, 11.1× lower | UNDER |
| + Butler and Dorgan, the Pawtucket shooter of Feb 2026, after the GVA count ends (6) | 0.32, 6.2× lower | 0.21, 9.2× lower | UNDER |
| Strict definition, full history: Violence Prevention Project 1966–2025, 1 of 198 shootings (Hale) | — | 0.036, 1.9× lower | NOT MEASURABLE* (1 case) |
| Strict definition, CPRC window 2018–2025, this page’s count: Hale (1) of ~44 attacks | — | 0.036, ~2.4× higher | NOT MEASURABLE* (1 case) |
* The two strict-definition rows each rest on one case, Audrey Hale, and this page treats both as no finding in either direction, the rule it applies to the Violence Prevention Project and Mother Jones in Part 3.
What This Data Cannot EstablishAge & Sex Confounders
Mass shooters are overwhelmingly male. Of the 202 shooters in the Violence Prevention Project’s database from 1966 to 2025, 197 were men. The trans population skews younger. Age-standardized and sex-stratified rates would be more precise but require data not currently available in public databases.
Mental Health Overlap
Trans adults have higher rates of depression and anxiety, partly attributed to minority stress. Mental health problems are also common among mass shooters, the National Institute of Justice found. The Violence Prevention Project’s founders point out that most people with serious mental illness are not violent, so a diagnosis says little about who will commit one. This overlap would need to be controlled for in a rigorous analysis. Being transgender is not a mental illness. The World Health Organization moved gender incongruence out of its mental disorders chapter in ICD-11.
Causation vs. Correlation
Even if rates were higher, this data would not establish trans identity as a causal factor. This article does not claim that being transgender prevents mass shootings.
Part 4 Sources
CPRC / Lott — "Transgender Shooters Commit Disproportionate Shares of Mass Public and Active Shooting Attacks—In 2024, for active shooters, at Least 12 Times Their Share of the Population", 20 February 2026 (the 6.2, 3.4 and 2.5 figures, the 7 of 284 and 3 of 25 counts, the 0.73% population share and the list of seven shooters) — crimeresearch.org
CPRC / Lott — "Updated Detailed Information on Mass Public Shootings from 1998 through 2025", 30 January 2026 (yearly counts of mass public shootings, 108 from 1998 to 2025 and 44 from 2018 to 2025 in its data file, and the Hale and Aldrich cases as the two trans mass public shooters) — crimeresearch.org
FactCheck.org — Ashley Wang, "Few Mass Shooters Have Been Transgender", 17 September 2025 (GVA’s five of 5,748; the Violence Prevention Project’s one of 201) — factcheck.org
FBI — Active Shooter Incidents 2024 Report — fbi.gov
New York Post, via AOL — the report that Thomas Crooks used they/them pronouns — aol.com
Colorado Politics — District Attorney Michael Allen on the Club Q shooter’s nonbinary claim, 3 July 2023 — coloradopolitics.com
NBC News — "Why extremism experts say it’s worth discussing the Colorado shooting suspect’s pronouns", 10 December 2022 (extremism researchers’ doubts about the Club Q shooter’s nonbinary claim) — nbcnews.com
Balakrishnan, Yang and Weber, "The interaction of adverse childhood experiences, sex, and transgender identity as risk factors for depression: disparities in transgender adults", Frontiers in Global Women’s Health, 2024 (higher depression and anxiety in trans adults; minority stress) — PubMed Central
National Institute of Justice — "Public Mass Shootings: Database Amasses Details of a Half Century of U.S. Mass Shootings with Firearms, Generating Psychosocial Histories", 3 February 2022 — nij.ojp.gov
Peterson, Densley, Knapp, Higgins and Jensen, "Psychosis and Mass Shootings: A Systematic Examination Using Publicly Available Data", Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2022 (most people with serious mental illness are not violent) — apa.org (PDF)
UN News — "A major win for transgender rights: UN health agency drops ‘gender identity disorder’, as official diagnosis", 30 May 2019 (ICD-11’s new chapter on sexual health) — news.un.org
Snopes — "Debunking chart that falsely suggests transgender people are more likely to commit mass shootings", 15 February 2026 (the chart’s first post on 27 August 2025, its maker’s 32 shooters with Aldrich counted as nonbinary, the race comparison; rated false) — snopes.com
Lead Stories — Uliana Malashenko, "Fact Check: FAKE Viral Chart Misrepresents Data About The Portion of Transgender People Involved In Mass Shootings", August 2025 (the EndWokeness post of 28 August 2025, no source given, the Gun Violence Archive’s founding director on the numbers) — leadstories.com
Note on database counts. Gun Violence Archive: the 2020–2025 figure of 3,515 is the sum of GVA’s own annual ledger, published 28 September 2026: 611, 690, 645, 659, 503 and 407. GVA revises counts as incidents are confirmed, so published totals vary by a few incidents between outlets and dates: The Trace gave 408 for 2025 and 504 for 2024. The all-time figures are the pair GVA’s founding director gave FactCheck.org for one span, 1 January 2013, when GVA’s database begins, to 15 September 2025: 5,748 mass shootings, with five confirmed transgender shooters among them. GVA has published no later count of trans shooters, so the all-time comparison stops at that date rather than setting a later total of shootings against an earlier count of shooters; GVA’s annual ledger pages, which run from 2014, sum to 5,598 for 2014 to 2025. GVA’s five include Aldrich, whose post-arrest claim this page rejects, so this page’s all-time numerator is four: Moseley, McKinney, Hale and Westman, two of them disputed. On GVA’s five, the all-time share of incidents is 0.09% and the trans rate 0.18 per 100,000, a gap of about 10 times by share and 11 times per capita rather than 12 and 14, the same arithmetic as the five-case row of the sensitivity table in Part 4. The Pawtucket shooting of 16 February 2026 comes after that date and enters only the six-case row. The Violence Prevention Project: 198 mass shootings by 202 shooters from 1966 to August 2025, counted in its own data (Version 10, January 2026), which has one row per shooter with a gender column; four of the shootings had two shooters, and the Nashville shooter is the one coded transgender. Its database page gives 202 as its total of mass shootings, which is its count of shooters. Its co-founder gave FactCheck.org 201 shooters for 1966 to 2024, so the count moves with the version of the data. Mother Jones: 155 cases from 1982 to August 2025, counted in its own data file, one row per case; the count moves as cases are added. It lists Snochia Moseley’s 2018 shooting at the Rite Aid warehouse, coded female; this page rates Moseley’s trans identity as disputed and counts the case as it does for GVA. Mother Jones excludes the Minneapolis shooting because fewer than three victims died.
Note on denominators. Every per-capita comparison on this page divides both sides by the same age range. The trans population is the Williams Institute’s 2025 estimate of 2.8 million people aged 13 and older, so the comparison population is the US population aged 13 and older, about 290 million. That is the Census total of 341.8 million less the 50.6 million under 13 in the Census’s own estimates by single year of age for July 2025, which gives 291.2 million. It is consistent with the Institute reporting 2.8 million as 1.0% of the 13-and-older population: 2.8 million over 290 million is 0.96%, which rounds to 1.0%. Dividing 2.8 million by a rounded 1.0% to get 280 million is a rounding artefact and is not used here. The share-of-population figure shown in the Part 1 table and the first chart, 0.84%, is the Williams Institute’s unrounded 2.86 million measured against the total US population of 341.8 million, rather than against the 13-and-older population. That is deliberate. It understates the trans share, which shrinks the apparent gap, and erring in the direction that weakens this article’s own conclusion is the safer choice. The per-capita comparisons are different: they put both groups on the same 13-and-older basis, which is why they give slightly larger multiples than the share-of-incidents figures.
Download this conclusion: counted per person
The sensitivity test in one image: mass shootings per 100,000 people, general population against trans people counted three ways, from this page’s four among all 2.8 million to six among the 1.87 million binary trans people, all three underrepresented.
The verdict: what the evidence shows
No. On the Gun Violence Archive, the one database with enough cases to measure, trans people carried out 12 times fewer mass shootings than their share of the population would give. The two strict lists hold too few trans shooters to show a difference either way, and the Crime Prevention Research Center’s figure of 6.2 times rests on Hale alone once Aldrich is set aside.
Claims and evidence
Claim"Trans people are disproportionately mass shooters"
EvidenceTrans people are underrepresented on the Gun Violence Archive, the only one of the three major databases with enough cases for a meaningful per-capita rate: by about 14× all-time and about 17× in 2020–2025, both measured in mass shooting incidents per person rather than individual shooters. The Violence Prevention Project (about 200 shootings) holds one confirmed trans shooter, Audrey Hale, and Mother Jones (about 150) holds Hale plus Snochia Moseley, whose trans identity is disputed. Trans people are about 1 in 120 Americans, and 1 in 120 of lists that size is one or two, so that is what you would expect if trans people were exactly as likely as anyone else. A result that one person can tip from below the population share to above it does not show a pattern either way.
Claim"Trans people have the highest mass shooting rate of any group"
EvidenceThe chart behind this, “Mass Shooting Rates by Demographic (2015–2025)”, counts just two shootings in ten years as trans, one for each of its trans bars, and one of the two is Aldrich, called nonbinary only by a defence lawyer after the arrest. One shooting cannot show a pattern, and Snopes rates it false.
Claim"There have been many trans mass shooters recently"
Evidence2 trans shooters counted here out of 3,515 mass shootings in 2020–2025, Hale and Westman, one of them disputed. Of 8 names circulated online, 4 have confirmed trans identity: McKinney, Hale, Van Rootselaar and Dorgan. Van Rootselaar's shooting was in Canada, outside every US database, and Dorgan's, a domestic shooting in February 2026 that meets GVA's threshold, postdates the count GVA published and is tested separately in Part 4.
Claim"Trans identity was the motive"
EvidenceNo confirmed trans shooter attacked to advance a trans political agenda. McKinney targeted students who bullied him for being trans, the only case in which police tied the motive to gender identity. Other motives on record: notoriety (Hale) and a family dispute (Dorgan); police found none for Van Rootselaar.
Claim"This justifies restricting trans people's rights"
EvidenceThe 2025 proposals, a terror designation and a gun ban among them, came in the weeks after the Minneapolis church shooting, most of them after the killing of Charlie Kirk, whose accused killer is not transgender. The statistical basis the proposals assume does not exist.
Download the conclusion
This card shows the two figures the article turns on, drawn to scale, with the sources named on it.
What would change this conclusion
This conclusion would change if independent researchers produced verified documentation of additional confirmed transgender mass shooters sufficient to bring the per-capita rate above the baseline population rate. Under the GVA definition, that would take about 44 to 52 additional confirmed cases in the 2013–2025 window, depending on whether the comparison is by share of incidents or per capita. Under the strictest definitions (3 or 4 or more killed, in public) the totals are so small that a single case more or fewer moves the trans share from below the population share to above it, which is why those comparisons are not treated as findings in either direction.
Cite this article
TruthBased.org. "Are Trans People Overrepresented as Mass Shooters?" Updated September 2026. https://www.truthbased.org/are-trans-people-more-likely-to-be-mass-shooters