Shortly after the tragic shooting at Covenant School in Nashville on Monday, it came to light that the suspect identified as transgender.
The alleged shooter who opened fire on students and staff, taking the lives of six individuals, was Audrey Hale — a 28-year-old former student of the private Christian school.
Hale was a biological woman who reportedly identified as a transgender man and preferred the name “Aiden.”
However, Hale is not the only mass shooter who has identified as transgender.
Maya McKinney admitted to taking part in a 2019 shooting at a charter school in the Denver region. The shooting wounded eight students and left one dead.
McKinney, a teenager at the time of the shooting, is a biological female who identifies as a man and goes by the name “Alec.” McKinney’s attorneys reportedly requested that she be referred to by “he/him” pronouns in court.
Snochia Moseley, 26, carried out a shooting that killed three people and injured three more outside of a Rite Aid warehouse in Aberdeen, Maryland, on September 20, 2018. Moseley died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound the same day.
According to a friend and screenshots of her social media, Moseley was a biological woman transitioning to identifying as a man.
A mass shooting last year at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs was allegedly perpetrated by Anderson Lee Aldrich, a biological man who was born Nicholas Franklin Brink and identifies as nonbinary. The shooting left five people dead.
On Monday, these details were raised in a viral tweet by Benny Johnson, a commentator and chief creative officer of Turning Point USA, that even garnered the attention of the platform’s owner, Elon Musk.
“One thing is VERY clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists,” Johnson wrote.
Similarly, Oli London, a formerly transgender man who has firmly spoken out against “gender ideology” since his detransition, alleged, “The trans movement is pushing more and more extremism each day,” per Newsweek.
“They recruit people, indoctrinate them and pump them full of propaganda until they become filled with hate and rage,” London claimed.
However, others note that transgender and nonbinary shooters still constitute a very small fraction of mass shooters in the United States.
“4 shooters out of over 300 mass shooters since 2009 are transgender or non binary,” wrote Anthony Zenkus, a Columbia School of Social Work professor, on Twitter. “That’s just 1.3% of all shooters … 99% of mass shooters in the United States are cis gendered.”
According to Everytown Research and Policy, 306 mass shootings in the United States have occurred since 2009. “Everytown defines a mass shooting as any incident in which four or more people are shot and killed, excluding the shooter,” according to the organization’s website.
The Gun Violence Archive reports that more than 2,800 mass shootings have been perpetrated in the United States from 2018 to the present — defining mass shootings as any incident in which four victims are shot, whether or not they are killed.
Accounting for this much larger figure, transgender or nonbinary shooters would be responsible for 0.14% of mass shootings over the past five years.