In a move both predictable and inexplicable, the Department of Justice is reportedly considering a new gun ban to strip gun rights from the nation’s estimated 2.8 million people (age 13 or older) who identify as transgender.
The impetus is two-fold. The Aug. 27 mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school, where two were killed and 18 injured, was committed by a person who had apparently transitioned to female several years earlier. Some people in the administration apparently believe that this may have been the impetus for this heinous act of violence.
Second, the Trump administration has moved to strip other rights from transgender people, including banning them from military service, moving transgender women in federal prisons to men’s prisons and removing “X” as a gender identification on passports for those who want to identify as neither male nor female.
But like many of the administration’s anti-transgender moves, the prospect of stripping gun rights from transgender people, spurred by calls from the MAGA right, suffers from both an evidence problem and a political problem.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, the U.S. has witnessed over 4,100 mass shootings — defined as four or more people shot, aside from the perpetrator — since 2018. Of those, four were committed by transgender people — less than 0.1 percent. Yet as a percentage of the nation’s population, the transgender community represents about 0.8 percent. That makes this proposed anti-transgender move a case of opportunistic scapegoating, not crime-fighting.
Moreover, the American Psychiatric Association holds that “‘transgender’ is not a psychiatric diagnosis,” and other medical organizations reject the idea that transgender people suffer from mental illness. The APA does recognize that some of these people may suffer from “gender dysphoria,” a state of “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.” But gender dysphoria is not linked to the commission of violence, though such people may justifiably fear violence from others.
As with the overwhelming majority of those diagnosed with mental illness, they are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.
Consider by comparison the chief identity characteristics of mass shooters. Roughly 95 percent of shooters are male, and about 55 percent are white (white men make up about 30 percent of the total U.S. population), meaning that white men are by far the most likely to commit such acts. But who is arguing that white men should be stripped of gun rights?
The political problem is that any step by the Trump administration to strip gun access to transgender people is liable to rile elements of both the right and the left.
Gun-rights proponents are actively challenging all manner of gun laws, even including court challenges to laws that keep guns from felons, minors and some mentally ill people. For example, the extremist Gun Owners of America recently tweeted in response to the possible Justice Department policy, “GOA opposes any and all gun bans. Full stop.” The National Rifle Association issued a more equivocal, if still critical statement, saying it “does not, and will not, support any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.” Expect similar reactions from other gun groups.
From the left, civil liberties groups and the gay and transgender community would surely raise objections as a clear example of invidious rights deprivation. While the acquisition of guns for self-defense actually increases rather than decreases danger for those getting the guns — extending to the far greater risks from suicide, accident, theft or misjudgment — gun acquisition for self-protection is nevertheless recognized as a Second Amendment right. And clearly, the gay and transgender communities face a disproportionately greater threat to physical safety than others.
In an era when political polarization seems only to have increased, stripping gun rights from transgender people might do the unthinkable: Create a moment of unity between left and right against the Trump administration.
Robert J. Spitzer is Distinguished Service Professor emeritus of political science at SUNY Cortland, and an adjunct professor at the College of William and Mary School of Law. He is the author of six books on gun policy, including “The Gun Dilemma” and the new tenth edition of “The Politics of Gun Control.”