Within the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Republican coverage equipment went instantly to work. The Heritage Basis, which revealed Project 2025, and its spinoff, the Oversight Challenge, issued a call for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to designate “Transgender Ideology-Impressed Violent Extremism,” or TIVE, as a home terrorism risk class. The push comes as President Donald Trump simply signed an executive order that seeks to mobilize federal regulation enforcement towards vaguely outlined home terror networks.
The Heritage Basis and Oversight Challenge doc, which defines “transgender ideology” as “a perception that wholly or partially rejects basic science about human intercourse being biologically decided earlier than start, binary, and immutable,” grounds its coverage suggestions in a startling declare: “Specialists estimate that fifty% of all main (non-gang associated) college shootings since 2015 have concerned or possible concerned transgender ideology.”
When WIRED requested for the info behind this declare, the Oversight Challenge didn’t reply; the Heritage Basis pointed to a tweet from one among its vice presidents, Roger Severino, claiming that “50% of main (non-gang) college shootings since 2015” contain a transgender shooter or trans-related motive. Severino additionally lays out what seems to be his whole dataset: eight shootings, 4 of which, he claims, contain “a trans-identifying shooter and/or a probable trans-ideology associated motivation.”
The info inform a distinct story.
Since 2015, a minimum of 4 dozen shootings have taken place on college grounds, based on knowledge from the K-12 School Shooting Database, which has tracked each incident involving a gun on college grounds since 1966. Solely three perpetrators within the database—the 2019 shooter at STEM College Highlands Ranch in Colorado and the Covenant College shooter in Nashville in 2023 amongst them—have been credibly recognized in public reporting as transgender or present process gender-affirming care. Nashville police concluded the shooter there was not motivated by a transparent political or ideological agenda, however prioritized notoriety and infamy. In Colorado, investigators say one of many shooters, a transgender boy, cited bullying and long-standing mental health struggles as motivations.
In an August taking pictures, a 23-year-old particular person opened fireplace outdoors Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. The shooter had legally modified their identify and written about battle over gender identification, however there is no such thing as a public proof they constantly recognized as transgender, making classification unsure. Police say the assault was fueled by hostility towards Jews, Christians, and minorities, together with a quest for notoriety. Prosecutors added the animus was sweeping, saying the shooter “expressed hate in the direction of nearly each group conceivable.”
The Ok-12 database, probably the most complete of its type, doesn’t embody gender knowledge for about 12.5 % of faculty shooters since 2015, which solely makes it harder to attract agency conclusions about broader patterns.
Different mass shootings at colleges, together with Parkland in 2018 and Uvalde in 2022, had been carried out by younger males with histories of grievance, misogyny, or violent ideation. None had been tied to “transgender ideology.”
The bigger sample, researchers say, factors in the wrong way: White supremacist, anti-government, and misogynist beliefs account for the lion’s share of ideologically motivated gun violence. Concentrating on “transgender ideology” as a terrorism class, they warn, confuses identification with ideology, dangers licensing violence towards anybody who defies gender norms, and shifts consideration away from the true drivers of schoolyard violence.
