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Police work to contain the scene during an active shooter situation at the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis on Wednesday.<\/span>Richard Tsong-Taatarii\/Minnesota Star Tribune\/Zuma<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The suspect in the<\/span> mass shooting responsible for killing two school-aged children and wounding 17 others at a Catholic church in Minneapolis on Wednesday has been identified as having changed her legal name in 2020 to reflect her identity as female.<\/p>\n \u201cMinor child identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification,\u201d a judge wrote in <\/strong>court records reported by the New York Times<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n Predictably, voices on the far right have immediately seized on that tidbit, blaming the suspect\u2019s gender identity for the shooting. \u201cToday\u2019s evil church school shooter was a trans who was likely groomed and transitioned as a teenager,\u201d Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted<\/a> on X. \u201cCongress MUST PASS my bill Protecting Children\u2019s Innocence Act to make it a FELONY to perform sex change surgeries and all forms of medications on minors!!!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOne thing is VERY clear: the trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder,\u201d wrote<\/a> conservative YouTube host Benny Johnson. \u201cThe pattern is undeniable.\u201d<\/p>\n Just one day after the horrific event, it isn\u2019t yet possible to conclude why the suspected killer choose to do what she did. But what we can say is that, despite the probable identity of yesterday\u2019s attacker, there is no evidence that transgender people are any more likely to commit mass shootings.<\/p>\n Rather, multiple independent databases tracking mass shootings confirm the opposite: The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings in which four or more people (not including the shooter) are shot or killed, estimated<\/a> last year that fewer than 1 percent of the shootings it reviewed in the last decade were carried out by trans individuals. Mother Jones<\/em> has its own database tracking shootings in which \u201cthree or more victims were killed in an indiscriminate public rampage.\u201d As I wrote<\/a> in 2023, very, very few of those were carried out by individuals who were not cisgender men.<\/p>\n One hundred and thirty four of the 141 mass shootings tracked by\u00a0Mother Jones<\/em>\u00a0since 1982 were carried out by men with no known history of identifying as trans or nonbinary. Two were carried out by women believed to be cisgender. Two more were carried out by a man and a woman, also believed to be cisgender, working together.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cFrom a statistical basis,\u201d I wrote, \u201ctransgender individuals are much more prone to being the victims of violence than they are likely to commit it.\u201d<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean transgender people are never responsible for these acts. There are, unfortunately, many preventable deaths caused by gun violence in the US; trans people make up a very small proportion of the US population, and they make up a similarly small proportion of gun-violence perpetrators.<\/p>\n\n