Deafening Silence After Mormon Church Shooter Not A "Transgender Leftist" But A Trump Supporter
The event is a case study in how shootings are covered in America.
On Sunday, news broke out of Michigan that a lone gunman crashed his vehicle into a Mormon church, opened fire, and set the building ablaze—another horrific act of violence in a country where such scenes have become all too common. Almost immediately, speculation swirled on Twitter, with far-right voices rushing to blame a Muslim or a “transgender leftist,” their favored scapegoats after mass shootings. But early images told a different story: the truck rammed into the church flew two large American flags and bore an Iraq War veteran plate. The shooter was no Muslim, no trans person. He was a Trump-supporting combat veteran—a cisgender white man who fit the profile of so many American mass shooters.
Just like that, the story faded from the political radar. There were no calls in the aftermath to investigate Trump supporters as potential terrorists. No national conversations about the violent capacity of cisgender men. No discussions about whether white people who fly massive American flags on the backs of their trucks should have their guns taken away. No presidential proclamations casting suspicion on the identity of this mass shooter. Cisgender combat veterans will not spend the days after this tragedy fearing that their rights will be stripped away because of the actions of one man.
I would ask you to imagine, for one moment, that this shooter had been transgender—but you don’t have to. Just last month, a similar tragedy unfolded in Minneapolis with a transgender shooter. It was a massive statistical outlier: transgender people account for only 0.087 percent of mass shootings in America, far below the per-capita rate for white men, and also far below white men when you only consider active shooter instances on school campuses, making up 3 of 74 such incidents. Yet in the wake of that rare event, the floodgates opened against transgender people.
Libs of TikTok and Matt Walsh called for treatment of transgender people as a mental illness and ending transgender healthcare at any age. Elon Musk shared Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s post confirming the shooter was transgender, declaring there “is a clear pattern here.” The Trump administration floated the idea of stripping guns from trans Americans altogether. And Charlie Kirk—ironically shot by a white male gunman just a month later—tweeted, “If you are crazy enough to want to hormonally and surgically change your sex… you have a mental disorder, and you are too crazy to own a firearm.”
There is a long history of blaming mass shootings on transgender people. After Trump was shot at last year, far-right outlets circulated a photo of an unrelated transgender woman and claimed she was the shooter. The same smear spread after Uvalde, echoed even by members of Congress. In Texas, a megachurch shooter was likewise misidentified as trans. And in the most recent shooting of anti-LGBTQ+ activist Charlie Kirk, outlets falsely reported that “transgender messages” were left at the scene—a crime in fact committed by a white cisgender man.
The contrast is no accident. The silence over a white male shooter decked out in Trump gear and camo, paired with the media frenzy that erupts whenever a shooter is falsely linked to transgender people, is part of a pattern. For years, the right has refused to reckon with the consequences of its own policies on guns, violence, and mental health—policies that have left America with body counts that would stagger almost any other country. Instead, everything bad that happens is filtered through the lens of who they already hate: Muslims, immigrants, transgender people. But when the shooter fits the most common profile—cisgender men—the script changes. Concern for violence only stretches as far as the color of the shooter’s skin, their religion, or now, their gender identity.
So as the headlines fade from this shooting, I ask readers to imagine a different world. A world where we treat every mass shooting as a symptom of America’s deeper failures. A world where combat veterans get real mental health care. Where buying a gun isn’t as easy as ordering a Big Mac. Where LGBTQ+ people aren’t scapegoated for every national tragedy. And where the actions of one person never become an excuse to strip rights from an entire community.
Of course they are going to keep it quiet - they found out it was one of their own.
Let’s just say the unspoken part out loud.
These mass shootings are committed by one demographic: white men.
Instead of the hate-filled suggestion to deny the trans community guns, let’s deny white men guns.
If we do, these mass murders will stop for good at that very moment.