By Ryan “Dickie” Thompson • Disruptarian Radio
In 2017 I published a breakdown on mass shootings in the United States. I argued then that the media kept forcing simple villains into a complex story. That post still stands. It is 2025 now. The noise is louder, the charts are prettier, and a lot of it is still nonsense. This page puts every claim next to a source, then shows the math with live charts you can inspect.
First things first: what the government tracks and what it ignores
The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports and Active Shooter documents record age, race, and sex of offenders. They do not record gender identity. There is no centralized, official dataset that lists the number of transgender offenders in murders or mass shootings. Because of that gap, any sweeping statistic about “how many trans shooters there are” cannot be verified against federal crime data.
Nonprofits like the Human Rights Campaign and Everytown focus on transgender people as victims. They do not publish national offender rolls. On top of that, police and media misgender suspects and victims in early reporting. That makes identity classification even noisier.
Bottom line: when a chart claims precise per capita rates for “trans shooters,” ask for the methodology and raw data. If there is no method note, it is opinion art.
Population matters: the trans denominator changed a lot
- 2015: Williams Institute estimated about 1.4 million adults identified as transgender, around 0.6 percent of adults.
- 2016 meta analysis: roughly 855,000 adults across 2006 to 2016 reported as transgender in surveys.
- 2025: Williams Institute now estimates about 2.8 million transgender people age 13 and up.
Same numerator with a changing denominator will move the per million rate. Five confirmed trans or nonbinary mass shooters since 2013 yields about 3.6 per million using the 2015 adult estimate, and about 1.8 per million using the 2025 estimate. Same five incidents. Different base. This is why cherry-picking population baselines makes viral graphics look dramatic.
Who actually commits mass shootings
Men do. That part is not controversial. Across the best public databases, men account for well over 97 percent of mass shooters. When you drill into race and per capita rates using the stricter “public, four or more killed” definition, the picture is steady over decades:
| Group | % of US population | % of public mass shooters | Rate per 100,000 | Read the note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| White Americans | 58% | 53% | 0.05 | Raw totals are high because the group is large. |
| Black Americans | 13% | 21% | 0.09 | Per capita slightly higher than whites in long-run data. |
| Latinos | 19% | 9% | 0.03 | Lower per capita. |
| Asians | 6% | 7% | 0.06 | Very close to proportional. |
So the lazy line that “cis white males commit most mass shootings” leaves out the denominator. White men make up a large share of the population. Per capita, long-run data shows Black and white males very similar, with Latinos lower and Asians near proportional. The constant across all groups is sex. It is men.
Chart: racial rates per 100,000 (1966 to 2024)
Rates use the stricter public mass shooting definition over the long window. They are directional, not exact counts for any single year.
Chart: trans per million using two denominators
Five incidents since 2013. Using the smaller 2015 population gives a higher per million value. Using the larger 2025 population cuts it roughly in half.
Known trans or nonbinary mass shooters since 2013
- Snochia Moseley – Aberdeen, Maryland, 2018. Three killed at a distribution center.
- Alec McKinney – Highlands Ranch, Colorado, 2019. One killed, eight wounded at STEM School. Trans boy, pled guilty.
- Anderson Lee Aldrich – Club Q, Colorado Springs, 2022. Five killed. Nonbinary identity claimed in court filings.
- Audrey Hale – The Covenant School, Nashville, 2023. Six killed.
- Robin Westman – Annunciation Catholic School, Minneapolis, 2025. Two children killed, many injured.
These cases are documented by fact-checkers who verified identity claims against court and police records. They are tragic, but they are rare relative to the whole universe of mass shootings. It is notable that the FBI does not collect this information, so there is no hard data other than what private individuals find.
Terror motivation and the headlines that follow
Ideology is not the majority driver, but it is the best headline. A few examples remind people of politics rather than base rates:
- Islamist inspired: San Bernardino 2015 and Pulse Nightclub 2016.
- White nationalist: El Paso Walmart 2019 and Pittsburgh Synagogue 2018.
- Anti LGBTQ target: Club Q 2022. (the shooter was a patron of the club and identified as non-binary)
Every one of these was committed by a man. Different creeds, same constant.
Victimization of transgender people is real and documented
When the conversation is about transgender people in crime statistics, the strongest data is about them as victims. HRC tracks fatal violence and finds that when a killer is known, a large fraction are intimate partners, friends, or family. That fraction has ranged from 26 percent to 42 percent in recent annual reports. Black transgender women are hit hardest by the overlap of racism, sexism, and transphobia. Studies show elevated external causes of death for transgender people. Drugs and overdose appear in some cases, but they are not shown as the primary cause of transgender murders in the best available reporting.
What the 2017 Disruptarian post concluded, and what still holds
- Men commit almost all mass shootings. That is still true.
- Within white mass shooters, political lean skewed liberal. That finding still appears in case reviews and it cuts against a popular stereotype.
- Race mostly tracks population share in long-run public mass shooting data. Black and white males are similar per capita. Latinos are lower. Asians are near proportional.
- Trans shooters exist, but they are single digits in twelve years. The number is tiny relative to the entire dataset. The population is also very small and represents much less than 1% of the entire population
- Riot violence, including the BLM riots that stretched across several years, is not counted as mass shootings. If you counted all mass political violence, including arson and beatings, the map of harm would change fast.
So the story is simpler and more honest than the internet wants it to be. If the goal is fewer massacres, focus on the constants that show up again and again: male offenders, leakage of plans, suicidal crises, and failure to intervene early. Identity memes will not save lives.
References
- FactCheck.org – Few Mass Shooters Have Been Transgender
- PolitiFact – Are trans people statistically more prone to commit gun violence
- Reuters – Fact check about trans people and school shootings
- The Violence Project – Mass Shooter Database
- NIJ – Public Mass Shootings Database article
- McBride at Ammo.com – Mass Shooters by Race summary
- Williams Institute – Transgender Population Estimates 2025 (if unavailable, try the Internet Archive at archive.org)
- Williams Institute – 2015 Transgender Adult Estimate (if unavailable, try the Internet Archive at archive.org)
- National Library of Medicine – Transgender homicide patterns, peer reviewed
- HRC – Fatal violence against transgender and gender non conforming people 2024
- Pulse Nightclub shooting, 2016
- San Bernardino attack, 2015
- El Paso Walmart shooting, 2019
- Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, 2018
- Covenant School shooting, 2023
- Disruptarian – Mass Shootings for the past 20 years USA, circa 2019
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