Two theories for what we’re seeing with recent mass shootings.
Two theories for what we’re seeing with recent mass shootings.
F our mass-casualty shooters in recent years — the Aberdeen/Perryman, Md., shooter, one of the two STEM School shooters in Denver, the Club Q shooter in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the Covenant School shooter in Nashville, Tenn. — were transgender or “non-binary,” and the Perry High School shooter in Iowa apparently aligned with the cause of trans advocacy. Just this week, police in Montgomery County, Md., arrested a transgender high-school student in connection with alleged threats to shoot up an elementary school. Remarkably, most of these individuals have been females, which is unusual considering that such shooters tend to be non-trans men.
To take the cases in order (relying for information mostly on this excellent account by Aleks Phillips for Newsweek): On September 18, 2018, trans-identifying female shooter Snochia Moseley walked into a pharmaceuticals distribution center in the Baltimore suburb of Aberdeen, shot three people fatally, and then shot herself in the head. According to a friend of the killer, “Moseley had suffered from bipolar disorder and depression . . . linked to feelings of rejection when Moseley had first come out as gay and later transgender.” The friend said, moreover, that “Moseley had begun receiving hormone therapy a year prior to the incident, and planned to undergo gender-reassignment surgery.”
Not very long afterward — on May 7, 2019 — Maya “Alec” McKinney, a female student who “asked to be referred to as male as they were transitioning at the time of the shooting,” entered the STEM academy she was attending in Highlands Ranch, a suburb of Denver, and opened fire on several groups of students along with co-conspirator Devon Erickson. One Highlands Ranch STEM School student was killed on the spot. An additional eight were injured seriously enough to require hospitalization and treatment.
Two years later, also in Colorado — a state with a disturbing history of mass shootings tracing back at least to the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 — Anderson Lee Aldrich entered an LGBT nightclub and began firing his semiautomatic weapon, leaving five dead and almost 20 more injured. While some commentators have argued that this could be “disingenuous,” Aldritch almost immediately described himself as a “non-binary person,” and his lawyers have argued formally in court that he should be referred to as such.
No such dispute exists in the case of the even higher-profile Nashville Covenant School shooting of March 27, 2023 — during which 28-year-old Audrey “Aiden” Hale entered the highly regarded Christian school and shot three young children, a teacher, a custodian, and the head of the school. Hale, previously a student at Covenant, arrived for her murder spree armed with three loaded guns, “including two assault weapons.” Since her act, two smaller-scale shootings have involved a woman who regularly used a male alias, who opened fire in a Houston church, and Perry High School’s male shooter whose social-media presence featured LGBT and pro-trans symbology, notably including the phrase “Love your trans kids.”
An epidemic? The mainstream, center-left media appear to rather assertively think not. USA Today ran a comprehensive article titled “Houston church shooting revives claims on trans shooters. Evidence shows they’re false.” It quoted criminologist James Densley of the Violence Prevention Project research center, who said: “There is no basis whatsoever for the idea that there’s an epidemic of transgender mass shooters. What we could say is we have an epidemic of male mass shooters.”
According to Densley, just one of the 200-odd mass shootings in his typical database (i.e., 0.51 percent of the total) was definitively committed by a trans person — which would be fairly proportional to the size of the transgender population. “The numbers simply don’t add up,” the USA Today team concludes, contending also that only one high-profile mass shooting has been carried out by a woman. Reuters, the Washington Post, and NBC have all recently gone out of their way to make the same point.
But it’s worth taking a deeper look at “the numbers.” First, a quick glance through the very small but high-quality data set that I pieced together for this article reveals that there have been three to four recent trans or “enby”-identifying mass killers, not one. Further, all of these shootings except the STEM School attack were “classic” mass shootings, in which three or more people besides the shooter were killed (not shot or fired at). There are in fact very few such terrifying, random assassinations: My own go-to database from Mother Jones lists just 150 since 1982 and 55 since the beginning of 2018.
Being as conservative as possible, and simply dividing the number three by 55, we see that trans shooters made up 5.5 percent of recent “real” mass shooters. That’s hardly a majority, but it is a significant overrepresentation if only about 0.6 percent of the United States population, per multiple sources linked above, identify as trans. Further, no fewer than three of the shooters discussed in this essay were females. This is noteworthy: Women commit less than 20 percent of murders overall in almost every year on record, and female mass shooters are extremely rare.
What is driving this (small-scale but genuinely disturbing) pattern? Two potential answers come rapidly to mind. The first is simply that giving powerful drugs such as pure testosterone to members of a population heavily composed of mentally ill teenagers is risky. Human testosterone is a serious, euphoria-causing hormone — that’s basically what anabolic steroids are — banned by virtually every athletics-oversight body around the globe. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s website contains a full-page description of the dangers of the drug, which has previously been linked to such behavioral issues as explosive “’roid rage.”
The fact that young “trans men” are no less likely than anyone else to be affected by suddenly quadrupling their levels of the male hormone linked to aggression may seem obvious. Center-right gadfly journalist Andy Ngo and others have pointed out the possible connection. Even traditional outlets noted the possibility, with Newsweek discussing several rather inconclusive studies on transgender hormone therapy but also pointing out the fact that testosterone has “long been known to cause increased aggression in men” and that testosterone levels tend to be far higher among criminals and other exceptionally aggressive males.
In this largely undisputed context, the sheer ease with which young, not always mentally stable individuals can obtain hormones and other gender-flexing services from the professional medical and therapeutic sector begins to seem like a serious scandal. Planned Parenthood offers “gender affirming hormone therapy services” nationwide, and the organization is one of the first results returned by a basic internet search for “testosterone prescriptions.” You can book an appointment with them, at least regionally, online. The organization’s only requirement appears to be that a patient be older than 16 (with the consent of any parent); 18-year-olds can receive hormones with no additional steps needed.
Nor does the process of accessing “care” become more difficult for older patients who are presumably well established in their sex/gender. A rather obviously female 53-year old mother from Davis, Calif., recently made headlines after “pretending to be non-binary” and being offered not merely testosterone but multiple expensive and risky surgeries by a whole range of doctors: “Despite never being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, I was able to obtain a prescription for testosterone and approval for a ‘gender-affirming’ double mastectomy from my doctor. It took only three more months to be approved for surgery to remove my uterus and have a fake penis constructed from the skin of my thigh or forearm.” Perhaps most remarkably, “therapy was never recommended” at any point during this process of consultation and prescription.
Although the talented Beth Bourne did not take advantage of these services, many Americans do. While conducting research for a talk on gender medicine that I gave at a recent conference organized by the nonprofit Genspect, I discovered that the number of U.S. patients who received hormone prescriptions at or under the age of 17 was 1,905 in 2017, 2,391 in 2018, 3,036 in 2019, 3,163 in 2020, and 4,231 in 2021. The increase in prescriptions during my study period was nearly 120 percent.
Rates of prescription have continued to increase sharply since 2021. In addition to those who obtained scripts for testosterone or estrogen, another 238 minors received “top surgeries” — that is to say, voluntary double mastectomies — in 2019. Two hundred and fifty-six did so in 2020, 282 in 2021, and a total of 776 across only my very brief study period. The consequences of today’s amazing leniency regarding major, optional medical procedures on young teenagers and other vulnerable citizens will be with us for some time to come.
Another possible contributor to the recent rise in the number of transgender and other atypical killers — including Kimbrady Carriker, a cross-dressing black male who was apparently not transgender — may be the political Left’s constant apocalyptic rhetoric. In recent years, the phrase “stochastic terrorism” has gained a great deal of popularity, referring as it does to violence against people who have been publicly demonized by political or media figures. This seems relevant.
Language about “stochastic terror” is most often used to criticize conservative players such as the popular social-media account Libs of TikTok. However, there seems to be no reason why the constant mass-media invocation of (largely imaginary) threats such as “trans genocide” or “genocide of colored people” would not have the same effect. Indeed, we have previously seen that it can and does: The lunatic who shot up a 2018 congressional baseball practice was a former campaign volunteer for Bernie Sanders and had “a clear hatred” for Republicans.
We may well be seeing the same sort of dramatic effect now, across a broader demographic. Leaked pages from the manifesto of Audrey Hale, the transgender Nashville shooter, certainly indicate that this is the case. The document is soaked through with modern social-justice jargon. In one amazing passage, Hale states that she specifically wanted to kill “little crackers” and refers to her underage victims as “a bunch of little f***ers with your white privlages [sic].”
Other factors may yet emerge in that case. But we are, to a significant extent, playing with fire. In an era when the most milquetoast aspects of “trad” culture and media are greeted with hysteria by urban upper-middle-class citizens (“Might my son be listening to Ben Shapiro?!”), we have decided — on the word of openly partisan organizations such as the now-disgraced World Professional Association for Transgender Health — that pumping young teenagers full of powerful and infrequently tested hormones and other chemicals . . . while reiterating that the world is out to kill them . . . is a risk-free business. Turns out, it’s not.