Everyone Knows What The Right Is Doing With This 'Trans People Are Mass Shooters' Thing
Two birds, one incredibly disingenuous stone.
For years, the Right has desperately sought a way to respond to mass shootings. They wanted an answer, any answer that was not the blatantly obvious answer and the only thing we all know would work — gun control. They’ve tried “Thoughts and prayers and don’t politicize it!” They’ve tried “More guns, actually! Guns for school teachers! In the classroom! Where the children are!” They’ve tried “It’s about mental health, which we also don’t want to do anything about or put any money towards fixing!”
Literally anything to avoid the obvious.
Over the last two years they’ve latched on to this idea that it’s trans people who are responsible for our mass shooting problem. Even when a shooter is not trans, right-wing social media users dutifully spend the first few days of the news blitz insisting that the shooter is trans or otherwise gender-nonconforming — which ends up being all most of them remember before another tragedy takes precedent in their minds. How many have there actually been? Probably around three trans or gender non-conforming people, including the most recent shooter, Robin Westman.
This accomplishes three things. It provides an answer other than “gun control,” it helps them demonize trans people, it portrays trans folks as mentally unbalanced — so as to justify the Right’s desire to discriminate against them — and it distracts from the fact that so many of these shooters tend to be pretty right-wing, and almost all of them are young white men.
Now, the Trump Department of Justice is actually calling for some gun control … but only for transgender people. One Justice official told CNN that the “Trump Justice Department leadership is seriously considering whether it can use its rulemaking authority to follow on to Trump’s determination to bar military service by transgender people and declare that people who are transgender are mentally ill and can lose their Second Amendment rights to possess firearms.”
Why yes, that is what the Right screams that Hitler did to the Jews, so that they wouldn’t be able to defend themselves from death camps. Meanwhile, no problem with domestic abusers owning firearms, and red-flag laws? Taking away a person’s guns after the due process of a judge deeming someone a danger to themselves or others? Those are right out too.
There is literally zero evidence whatsoever that being trans in any way contributed to Robin Westman’s desire to go on a shooting spree. In fact, Westman’s writings suggest that they were in the process of detransitioning, and it’s still unclear how Westman identified at the time of the shooting. There is also no evidence whatsoever that being trans had anything to do with their reason for carrying out the shooting. What is clear, however, is that Westman was heavily involved in online troll culture (which, nota bene, is pretty damn right-wing) and online spaces dedicated to “nihilistic violent extremism,” where users often share an admiration of mass shooters.
Even if there were, even if Westman went on a shooting spree because they were angry about being discriminated against, it would not justify taking guns away from trans people across the board — and I say this as someone who does, in fact, want to take practically everyone’s guns away.
Nevermind the fact that there have only been like, less than a handful of trans shooters out of hundreds of mass killers — and that far more of these shooters and mass murderers had shared the same ideology and fears as your average right-wing pundits. Hell, many of them were inspired by them.
Just right now, off the top of my head, I can think of 21 mass killers and mass shooters of the right-wing extremist variety — and I didn’t include the incels who are mad at “women existing”!1 There was a time when it might have been more fair to say that many of these people were right-wing and white supremacist extremists, but these days there is not much daylight between a 2025-era “respectable” right-wing pundit and a 1995-era right-wing extremist, of the sort we used to see bombing buildings and appearing on “Donahue.” They’re all very concerned about white genocide, the government telling them what to do, LGBTQ+ existing, other flavors of people existing.
Those are just mass murderers and attempted mass murderers, by the way. If I were to start listing individual people, or just trans people, or even just black trans women killed by anti-LGBTQ+ fanatics, we’d be here all day. Unfortunately, there’s a Wikipedia page for that. For now, let’s point out that murders of transgender people actually doubled from 2017 to 2021, right around the same time the Right was ramping up their transphobic hysteria. Seventy-three percent of those victims were killed with guns.
You know, I keep thinking — we all followed the advice of “Don’t use their names, don’t publish their manifestos, it will only encourage others to follow in their footsteps.” It’s not entirely wrongheaded. Multiple mass murderers have said they were inspired by the Christchurch mosque shooting (though I do kind of think they might have found their way to something similar without the inspiration).
But at the same time, we have the Right constantly clutching their pearls and crying about how frightened they are by the “violent” Left, because of protests at which every death was caused by law enforcement or by someone not actually protesting (often, actually, by right-wing lunatics like Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry — both of whom got away with their crimes, with the latter pardoned by Texas Governor Greg Abbott himself).
This is, at heart, a troll. Republicans know full well that there is not some kind of “epidemic” of transgender mass shooters. They know exactly what they’re doing here. They want so desperately to justify their claims that there’s no such thing as transgender people, just mentally unstable people who have been manipulated by the liberal media into believing they are transgender. They want to be able to portray transgender people as violent psychopaths in order to justify their dehumanization of them.
The irony, I suppose, is that this kind of trolling is done with the same blackpilled nihilism that actually did inspire Robin Westman’s murder spree. It’s the same spirit of “Who cares, as long as I get what I want!” Westman wanted infamy, the Trump administration wants justification for their bigotry and their opposition to gun control otherwise, and both are willing to do anything to get it.
The Right, as a whole, is motivated by nothing so much as the desire to be able to act like assholes without anyone telling them “Hey, you’re acting like an asshole.”
It’s unlikely that this will actually result in anyone trying to take guns away from transgender people — though only because that could open the door to taking guns away from other people. What it will do, however, is distract from the need for actual gun control and further the narrative that transgender people are mentally unstable or dangerous in some way. Let’s not let it.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
*Shall we count?
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (1995 Oklahoma City bombing)
Eric Robert Rudolph (1996 Olympics bombing, abortion clinic bombing)
Jim Adkisson (2008 Unitarian Universalist Church shooting)
Anders Brevik (2011 Norway bombings)
Kevin William Harpham (2011 Spokane bombing attempt)
Wade Michael Page (2012 Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting)
Jerad and Amanda Miller (2014 Las Vegas shooting)
Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. (2014 Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting)
Dylann Roof (2015 Charleston Church shooting)
Omar Mateen (2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting)
James Alex Fields (2017 Charlottesville Unite The Right attack)
Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr. (2018 US mailbombing attempts)
Brenton Tarrant (2019 Christchurch, New Zealand shooting)
John Earnest (2019 Poway Synagogue shooting)
Patrick Crusius, (2019 El Paso shooting)
Nathaniel Veltman (2021 Ontario truck attack)
Hugo Jackson (2021, stabbing and attempted mass murder at a school in in Sweden)
Payton Gendron (2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting)
Anderson Lee Aldrich (2022 Colorado Club Q shooting)
Ryan Palmeter (2023 Jacksonville Dollar General shooting)
Solomon Henderson (2025 Nashville shooting)
When Obama was elected, dumbass lady I worked with went into the desert with her whole family at night and buried all of their guns so he wouldn't take them.
I was surprised she was telling me this, since all the secrecy about it meant that it was to hide them, right? She knew who I was--why was she risking it? But also:
"Why do you need those guns?"
"To protect our family!"
"How are you going to do that when they're buried in sand 30 miles from here?"
...
Mrs. Betty Bowers
@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social
AMERICA: “It’s a mental health issue.”
REST OF THE WORLD: “We have those. But don’t have mass shootings.”
AMERICA: “It’s video games.”
WORLD: “We have those too. But don’t have mass shootings.”
AMERICA: “It’s cause they took Jesus out of the classroom.”
WORLD: “God, you’re stupid.”