Gun violence is an American tradition, one that is repeated multiple times a day, every day. Yet, for a country so desensitized to violence, few incidents seem to capture media attention more than the spectacle of shootings carried out by transgender individuals. And recent, senseless killings are no different, even though mass shootings by transgender people are statistically rare.
On Monday, Feb. 16, Robert Dorgan, who also went by Roberta Esposito, shot and killed their ex-wife and teenage son at a high school hockey game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, before turning the gun on themself; three bystanders were also injured in the shooting. Shortly after news broke that the shooter was identified as transgender, a chorus of influencers and political commentators sang in unison. Podcast host Matt Walsh posted to his 4 million followers on X: “Any adult man with a wife and children who ‘transitions’ to a ‘woman’ is automatically a threat to his family and the public. All of them should be looked at with suspicion and extreme wariness.” Another influencer, Branton Tatum, with nearly 1 million followers on X, wrote: “Transgenderism is a sickness that is spreading rapidly.”
The tragedy in Rhode Island and the transphobic rhetoric that followed came on the heels of another deadly mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada that left nine people dead and more than 25 injured—the deadliest Canadian mass shooting since the Nova Scotia attacks in 2020. Like the Pawtucket incident, the Tumbler Ridge perpetrator, later identified by authorities as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, was also transgender.
Despite the disproportionate attention given to the shooters’ gender identities by some of the loudest voices online, the perpetrators’ connections to extremist ideologies and subcultures were widely ignored. Photos posted to social media show Dorgan sporting several tattoos connected to Nazi ideology, such as the “Totenkopf,” or “death’s head,” used by the 3rd SS Panzer Division in World War II, as well as a pair of SS bolts. A preliminary investigation by the ADL’s Center on Extremism (COE) revealed that Van Rootselaar “followed a troubling pattern of online radicalization marked by engagement with violence and gore content.”
As with any public tragedy, especially acts of violence such as mass shootings, the subsequent media and social commentary firestorm seeks to place blame on a vulnerable scapegoat. Instead of taking the opportunity to discuss practical solutions to gun violence, loud social media personalities selectively focus on a perpetrator’s gender identity. As a result, the transgender community has become the target of smear campaigns designed to further isolate them from mainstream society and desensitize the greater public to acts of retribution against an imagined enemy.
The data and the evolving nature of extremism show that such scapegoating is grossly misplaced.
What the Data Show
For all of America’s cultural exports, mass shootings rank near the top, with deleterious effects. Despite representing only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for nearly one third of the world’s mass shooters and 73 percent of all mass shootings in developed countries. Since 2015, mass shootings, which the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) defines as an event in which “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed,” excluding the perpetrator, have trended upwards, reaching a peak of 690 victims in 2021. Alternatively, the Violence Prevention Project (VPV), which uses the Congressional Research Service’s standard of four or more victims murdered in a single event, excluding any underlying criminal activity, reaches similar conclusions, tracking an all-time high of 36 shootings between 2015 and 2019. The period of 2020 to 2024 fared slightly better, but just barely, with 28 mass shootings.
Despite the differences in definitions and methodology, the data bear unmistakable truths: mass shootings carried out by transgender individuals are exceedingly rare. Following the August 2025 mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by Robin Westman—who was transgender—rumors and misinformation regarding the frequency of similar events ran rampant.
However, in an email to Factcheck.org, the GVA’s founding executive director, Mark Bryant, clarified that between January 1, 2013, and September 15, 2025 just five of the 5,748 mass shootings recorded during that time were confirmed to have been carried out by transgender shooters. This represents less than 0.01 percent of the sample. Operating within even more restrictive inclusion criteria, the VPV’s co-founder and deputy director, James Densley, identified just one of 201 mass shooters as transgender, or approximately 0.5 percent. The remaining 200 shooters in VPV’s data consisted of 196 cisgender men and four cisgender women, demonstrating what Densley described as a “vanishingly small proportion of perpetrators.” Densely further confirmed that the hysteria directed at transgender individuals is misplaced by pointing out that they are, in fact, underrepresented in the data proportionate to their share of the population in the United States, which is estimated at one percent.
The Real Patterns: Diffuse and Overlapping Motives in Mass Violence
Irrespective of the disproportionate attention paid to a shooter’s alleged or confirmed gender identity, ideological drivers behind a perpetrator’s violent act often take center stage. The truth of the matter is that violent actors have grown increasingly diffuse in their ideologies and motivations. In some cases, no motive can be identified.
For instance, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, who carried out the deadliest mass shooting in American history in Las Vegas, Nevada, in October 2017, when he killed 60 and injured nearly 900 more, had no official motive. Separate investigations by the Clark County Sheriff and the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit concluded that there was no conspiracy or second shooter, and no “single or clear motivating factor” for the shooting, respectively.
Even outside of mass shootings, recent instances of social violence seem to defy traditional classification and do not immediately present clearly articulated motives or ideologies. One such example can be found in the case of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the attempted assassin of then-candidate Donald Trump, whose internet search history revealed a year-long plan to commit an act of violence, but with no clear ideological motive. In another case, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, who opened fire on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Dallas, Texas, in September 2025, was described by his friends in an interview with journalist Ken Klippenstein as someone who was “never really into politics,” but was instead an “edgelord” and “irony guy.”
To further fan the flames of confusion, the recent rise in Nihilistic Violent Extremists, or NVEs, adds yet another layer to an already complex landscape. Adjacent to, or even within, these NVE communities lies the True Crime Community subculture (TCC). The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) describes the TCC as an online fandom dedicated to obsessing over high-profile killers, including mass murderers such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, Adam Lanza, and Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Several recent school shootings have since been connected to the TCC, including those in Madison, Wisconsin, Antioch, Tennessee, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Evergreen, Colorado. The Tumbler Ridge shootings in February appear to fit this pattern as well.
While two of the aforementioned shooters connected to the TCC were identified as transgender, their identity as such is statistically insignificant when compared to the hundreds—if not thousands—of previous cisgender shooters. But that hasn’t stopped a moral panic from spreading across social media.
Tragedy and Moral Panic: Scapegoating on Social Media
As a result of today’s highly decentralized media landscape, where the once-storied legacy outlets no longer serve as the primary source of information for most Americans, opportunities for spinning and amplifying baseless conspiracy theories to gain notoriety or make a quick buck are virtually limitless. In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, some commentators work to ensure that their version of events or analysis of the situation come to the forefront of social discourse. This pattern rings especially true when it comes to acts of violence, where the perpetrator’s gender identity, whether real or imagined, takes precedence.
After the Tumbler Ridge shooting, other acts of violence carried out by transgender individuals have resurfaced on social media, particularly X, where previous attacks are highlighted in an attempt to paint trans people, and the broader LGBTQ+ community in general, as mentally unstable and therefore inherently prone to violence. Incidents like the September 2018 Aberbeed, Maryland, shooting at a Rite Aid distribution center, a May 2019 charter school shooting in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and the March 2023 shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, are just a few examples that commentators with millions of followers use to vilify their targets.
Beyond the fact that some of these shooters were indeed transgender, the rampant speculation that any mass shooter may be either non-cisgender, or heterosexual sets a dangerous precedent. It opens the door to more violence directed at a community that is more likely to be the victims of gun violence than perpetrators. To make matters worse, high-ranking government officials are also guilty of perpetuating outright lies or inaccurate statistics. The peddling of such falsehoods has led to multiple troubling developments, including the potential to strip transgender people of their right to bear arms and the push to designate “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” as a new form of domestic terrorism by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.
But for those pushing a hate-fueled agenda, the facts and statistics proving them incorrect are irrelevant.
Conclusion
As gun violence continues to plague the United States, familiar patterns of blame resurface. Rather than confronting well-established risk factors of gun violence—easy access to weapons, possession by prohibited individuals, domestic violence, and mental health crises—some commentators turn isolated incidents into broad, damning indictments. In recent years, transgender identity has increasingly been used as a causal explanation for mass violence, despite clear evidence pointing to the contrary. Time and again, the data remain unambiguous in their conclusions: the overwhelming majority of mass shootings are committed by cisgender men, most often motivated by personal grievance, interpersonal conflict, ideological extremism, or some unstable combination of them. Transgender perpetrators represent a statistically inconsequential share of these attacks. As such, rare and tragic cases do little to constitute a trend.
Mass shooter motivations are evolving to become more diffuse and difficult to categorize, and the temptation to superimpose simple narratives to explain the reasoning behind them becomes almost insatiable. Scholars, journalists, and public officials have a responsibility to resist the urge to feed moral panic and correct hateful misinformation, not only to preserve the integrity of legitimate research but also to prevent already marginalized communities from becoming convenient stand-ins for explanations of a crisis that has largely been settled.
