Trans Gun Bans Are Wrong
A suspect in the murder of Turning Point USA cofounder Charlie Kirk was taken into custody on Thursday night. Tyler Robinson, 22, confessed the crime to his father, who recognized him from photos of the perpetrator released by the FBI. While it appears to be a politically motivated act, this remains a complicated and fluid situation. We will continue to follow updates as more details become available.
Immediately before Kirk was killed by gunfire on Wednesday at a Utah Valley University event, he was asked a question about gun violence by an attendee. According to KCRA, an audience member asked him, “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” Kirk replied, “Too many.” The questioner then asked, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?” Kirk responded, “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Then, tragically, a single shot rang out.
The issue of transgender Americans and guns was sparked by the shooting at Annunciation School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, late last month. The perpetrator, Robin Westman, who killed herself after opening fire on schoolchildren and parishioners attending Mass, was a trans woman. That incident led the U.S. Department of Justice to consider a very controversial policy: banning all transgender people from buying guns.
Kirk was a complex person. Though he was a strong 2nd Amendment supporter, he championed the policy proposal, saying on social media, “If you are crazy enough to want to hormonally and surgically ‘change your sex,’ you have a mental disorder, and you are too crazy to own a firearm.”
Along with many prominent gun rights advocacy groups, including the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America, we strongly disagreed.
At 97Percent, we have long supported strong, principled policies that preserve Constitutional freedoms while making communities safer. That’s why we oppose a ban on transgender individuals—or on any identity group—owning firearms. Not only does such a policy infringe on 2nd Amendment rights, but it also unjustly targets a small, vulnerable group and distracts from evidence-based approaches that truly reduce gun violence.
Transgender individuals are as entitled as any other U.S. citizen to the Constitutional right “to keep and bear Arms.” The proposed policy—if enacted—would effectively strip them of these protections based solely on their gender identity, without individualized assessment or due process. Legal experts warn that any such sweeping rule would face immediate Constitutional challenges. That so many gun‑rights advocates publicly oppose this measure underscores how antithetical it is to the core principles of gun rights.
Further, there is no credible data indicating that transgender people are more prone to violence or mass shootings than the general population. An analysis by the Violence Prevention Project found than 1% of mass shootings involved a transgender individual—a proportion in keeping with their share of the population. Not only does the evidence suggest that transgender persons do not commit gun violence at disproportionate rates, but they are actually more often victims themselves.
Misguided policies that group law‑abiding citizens—including transgender individuals—into broad categories of “mental defectiveness” dilute real efforts to curb dangerous access to firearms. We must focus limited enforcement and reform resources on people with credible indicators of risk: recent acts of violence, violent criminal history, and other observable behaviors that indicate risk. Redirecting policy attention from rational, narrowly tailored measures risks weakening the impact of interventions that actually reduce violence—in some cases, like the violence we witnessed this week in Utah.
Rather than undermining rights based on a lack of data and diverting focus from the real root causes of violence, we urge decision-makers to reject this path and instead endorse impactful, Constitutionally sound strategies. We support proven, fair, and evidence-based policies that mitigate violence by keeping guns out of dangerous hands—while safeguarding Constitutional liberties for all law‑abiding Americans.