The Trump Department of Justice is reportedly weighing how to ban transgender individuals from owning firearms — despite Second Amendment protections — after two mass shootings this year involved suspects believed to be transgender. Transgender people are linked to fewer than one percent of all mass shootings.
“The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings in which four or more people (not including the shooter) are shot or killed, estimated last year that fewer than 1 percent of the shootings it reviewed in the last decade were carried out by trans individuals,” according to Mother Jones. The media outlet added that “to blame the unnerving prevalence of mass shootings in America on the existence of trans people here isn’t just a dangerously stigmatizing, politically motivated take. It’s also bad math.”
President Donald Trump has already banned transgender people from serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, claiming gender dysphoria is incompatible with military service.
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Banning transgender people from owning firearms “would represent a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s fight against the rights of transgender Americans,” CNN reports, noting that “senior Justice Department officials are weighing proposals to limit transgender people’s right to possess firearms.”
DOJ 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, according to one Justice official.”
Doing so would likely require classifying people with gender dysphoria as not mentally ill, but “mentally defective,” CNN reports, if any such ban were to be legal under federal law.
Critics are blasting the Trump administration.
“Well, there it is. The Trump administration is exploring a ban on trans people owning firearms. Trans people have accounted for less than a tenth of a percent of mass shootings over the past decade, but Trump is predictably seizing the opportunity to further oppress trans people,” lamented writer Charlotte Clymer.
Clymer added: “The firearms ownership ban for trans people is patently unconstitutional, and I’m willing to risk sounding naive in saying the courts will immediately reject it, including SCOTUS. But meanwhile, this signals where the Trump admin is moving on trans people. And it’s terrifying.”
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“In a totally unsurprising twist, MAGA are the gun grabbers they’ve warned us about,” wrote Joshua Reed Eakle, executive director of Project Liberal.
“Republicans are coming for your guns!!!” declared political analyst and strategist Rachel Bitecofer.
“This is an overtly discriminatory civil rights violation. Trans people have the same legal rights as other Americans — end of story. There are lots of good reasons to keep certain people from owning guns. Being trans isn’t one of them,” wrote Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh.
Reason magazine’s Billy Binion called it “legally illiterate.”
“Any court would laugh it out in 30 seconds,” he added. “We have something called ‘the Second Amendment’—which I thought conservatives supported.”
Even President Trump admits most mass shooters are not transgender. In an interview with the right-wing Daily Caller on Monday, the president was asked about transgender suspected mass shooters.
“I do say it’s also taking place with people that were not transgender, you know?” Trump said, adding, “generally it’s people that aren’t transgender, so you know.”
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