Even though we’ve seen a pair of transgendered murder sprees in recent days, Politifact claims that there’s no such thing as trans terrorism. Their “move along, nothing to see here” make-believe reporting designed to protect a “vulnerable” identity group is one big reason why trust in the media is near historic lows. The alarming reality that mainstream outlets like Politifact refuse to confront shows that transgender individuals are dramatically overrepresented in mass public shootings, according to research by John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
In a detailed analysis, Lott dismantles Politifact’s claims of “no evidence” of rising LGBTQ+ violence. Or that trans people being statistically more prone to open fire on at schools, churches, hockey games…wherever.
Politifact’s cherry-picked report err fundamentally by citing only the raw percentage of attacks by trans perpetrators without normalizing for their minuscule share of the population (1% or less). That’s basic statistical malpractice. If a tiny demographic commits an outsized portion of rare, horrific crimes, the disparity screams for attention.
Estimates of the adult trans population average between 0.7% and 1%. Yet from 2018 to 2025, trans individuals accounted for mass public shootings (four or more murdered in public settings, per FBI-style definitions excluding gang/robbery crimes) at 6.2 times their share of the population.
The gap has widened further in recent years. In 2024 alone, trans perpetrators carried out active shooting attacks at more than 12 times—and possibly over 16 times—their expected rate based upon their share of the population at large.
High-profile examples underscore the pattern: the 2023 Nashville Covenant School shooter (targeting a Catholic school) and the 2022 Club Q killer in Colorado Springs (who identified as nonbinary and used they/them pronouns). And the two from the past few days, one in Canada and the other in Rhode Island.
This overrepresentation isn’t about raw numbers. Non-trans people still commit the vast majority of these crimes in absolute terms. This is about per capita risk. The intersection with severe mental illness, frequently documented in these cases, combined with hormone treatments compounds the danger. Trans individuals often face elevated rates of psychological distress. When untreated or amplified by other factors, the evidence seems to indicate that it can erupt into extreme violence far more disproportionately than among the non-trans population.
Politifact’s failure to adjust for population size whitewashes a real threat, prioritizing narrative over data. Honest prevention demands facing facts: the data shows that mentally ill transgender individuals pose a heightened per-capita risk for mass murder compared to the non-trans population as a whole. Denying this won’t protect innocents—it only endangers them. It’s time for unflinching, evidence-based action.
For all this and more, here’s Lott’s report at the Crime Prevention Research Center:
A widely cited February 2024 report by Politifact claimed: “No evidence of rising LGBTQ+ violent extremism or ‘trans terrorism.” A follow report by them in September 2025 that examined both the FBI’s definition of active shooting attacks and the notion of mass shootings concluded: “Are trans people ‘statistically’ more prone to commit gun violence? Data shows a different picture.” It looked at the period from 2018 to 2024 that we examine here.
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. 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.
Different estimates place transgender individuals at varying shares of the population, and researchers measure attacks in different ways (for example, distinguishing between active shooting attacks and mass public shootings). But regardless of how one breaks down the data, transgender individuals commit these attacks at disproportionately high rates. As we discuss below, in 2024 transgender individuals committed active shooting attacks at least 12 times their share of the population and possibly more than 16 times their share.
The FBI’s active shooting reports focus on shootings that occur in public and do not involve other crimes, such as drug gang fights or robberies. Traditionally, the FBI has classified a “mass” killing as the murder of four or more people, and academic studies have used a similar definition. We use that same definition (more details are available here). We have now looked at the numbers for both mass public shootings (active shootings involving four or more people murdered) and active shootings.
As we have pointed out before, transgender individuals are well over-represented in terms of mass public shootings. There are three estimates of the percentage of adults who are trans (CDC’s Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) finds 0.5% between 2017 to 2020, Gallup shows 0.7% in 2021, and the Census puts it at 1% in 2023). These numbers are clearly increasing over time, so an average for 2018 to 2023 years would probably overestimate the rate, but the average is 0.73%. Trans share of mass public shootings over the 2018 to 2025 period is 6.2 times their share of the population. The Nashville Catholic School shooter in 2023 and the Club Q murderer who identified as nonbinary and used the pronouns they and them in 2022 were transgender individuals.
John Lott did a good job here.
But he should also try looking into the number that were stopped before they began. Nov 2024 to Nov 2025 there were around 120 trans people (including the they/them non-binary types of trans) that were stopped before they could carry out their mass killing attacks, most reported by family or friends, a few just a hour or less away from carrying out the attack, a few did self-surrender or kill their selves after they could not get into the place they planned for so stopped their selves, some were stopped for traffic violations en-route to their target and had outstanding warrants for something else or had or did something that made the police look further. It took some doing but I managed to pull these put from news report indicators that led to police reports and other accounts that described the circumstances, heck, some were described in news reports as planning ‘self-harm’ with no mention of them planning to conduct a mass killing before they did that ‘self-harm’. Most of them seemed to have liked schools and school events, especially church schools, and churches the most for their attacks.
Trans violence is easy to coverup, and that’s what has been happening for a lot of it. Unless its something big like an actual mass-shooting, no one digs to uncover it. And if its gets reported to police, a lot of police departments now use the persons trans identity factors so, for example, a biological male gets listed as female with their adopted female name and the trans connection is lost in relation to that crime unless someone starts digging to uncover it. So when the LGBTQ+ community points to crime stats involving trans to make their claims, its a game they play because they know most trans violence is hidden from crime stats and the public by using their trans identifying factors to make it look like its either male or female and no connection provided to the trans factor. It was the same as violent gay people, there is no box to check on police reports that says ‘gay’.