Despite a growing trend of transgender mass shooters over the past few years, the so-called “mainstream media” continues to ignore the facts. In fact, they won’t publish or air any stories that are negative toward transgender individuals.
At the other end of the spectrum are those claiming that “nearly all” recent mass murders have been committed by transgender people. That’s not true, and can be just as damaging as ignoring the facts.
Thankfully, researcher John Lott from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has crunched the numbers. And a recent report posted at the CRPC website tells the true story.
In a report titled “Transgender Shooters Commit Disproportionate Shares of Mass Public and Active Shooter Attacks—In 2024, at Least 12 Times Their Share of the Population,” Lott debunked a widely cited February 2024 Politifact.com report that claimed there was no evidence of such a trend.
“Unfortunately, these and similar claims make a basic error: they look only at the share of attacks committed by transgender individuals and fail to adjust for transgender individuals’ share of the population,” the report stated. “That is an obvious statistical mistake. If a group makes up just 1 percent of the population but commits 10 percent of the attacks, no one would dismiss that disparity simply because the group accounts for ‘only’ 10 percent of active shooting attacks.”
As the study further pointed out, other organizations like Snopes have concluded: “Mass shooters are not disproportionately transgender, contrary to claims.” However, according to Lott, they compound the problem by using a much broader definition of shootings than the FBI uses.
“For example, the Gun Violence Archive compiles ‘mass shootings’ that overwhelmingly involve gang fights over drug turf and, to a lesser extent, other crimes such as robberies,” the CPRC study stated. “While those incidents may be important to study, they differ fundamentally from shootings in which an individual enters a location with the sole goal of murdering and injuring as many people as possible to generate publicity.”
So, what’s the truth about transgender shooters? According to the report, given that transgender individuals were 0.73% of the population over the 2018 to 2025 period, their share of mass public shootings over that period was 6.2 times higher than their share of the population.
With that information, CPRC reviewed the FBI’s active shooting reports and identified which of those attacks involved trans individuals. CPRC conducted the analysis in two ways: relying solely on the FBI’s data on active shooting cases and incorporating additional cases that CPRC has compiled using the FBI’s definition of “active shootings.”
“Using only the FBI data over the entire period, transgender individuals commit active shooting attacks at 3.4 times their share of the population,” the report stated. “And if you use the higher Census estimate that they make up 1 percent of the population, it is 2.5. Using the CPRC’s expanded dataset of active shooting cases, the estimate is reduced from 3.4 to 2.1 times their share of the population.”
The matter has gotten worse in the most recent years studied. While transgenders committed 2.73% of active shooting attacks in 2022 and 2.84 % in 2023, the percentage jumped to 16.37% in 2024.
“Even if one assumes the highest estimate of transgender individuals from the Census, that they make up 1% of the population, their share of active shooting attacks in 2024 is 12 times their share of the population,” the report stated.
Ultimately, the report concluded that most of the discussions about transgender individuals dismiss shootings by that portion of the population as a serious concern because they only examine their attacks as a share of total attacks and don’t adjust for transgender individuals’ share of the population.
“But once one realizes that is the only way to properly analyze the data, regardless of how one measures it—whether using only FBI data or the expanded dataset—active shooting attacks committed by transgender individuals are becoming a serious problem,” the report concluded.
