The K-12 database, the most comprehensive of its kind, does not include gender data for about 12.5 percent of school shooters since 2015, which only makes it more difficult to draw firm conclusions about broader patterns.
Other mass shootings at schools, including Parkland in 2018 and Uvalde in 2022, were carried out by young men with histories of grievance, misogyny, or violent ideation. None were tied to “transgender ideology.”
The larger pattern, researchers say, points in the opposite direction: White supremacist, anti-government, and misogynist beliefs account for the lion’s share of ideologically motivated gun violence. Targeting “transgender ideology” as a terrorism category, they warn, confuses identity with ideology, risks licensing violence against anyone who defies gender norms, and shifts attention away from the real drivers of schoolyard violence.
“There are no legitimate studies that suggest that a majority of school shootings since 2015 involve trangender people,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas and R. G. Cravens of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project in an email. “Trans people are far more likely to be victimized by gun violence than to perpetrate it.”
The FBI defines a “mass shooting” as an incident in which four or more victims are killed by gunfire, not including the shooter or shooters. However, other less restrictive definitions are more widely accepted. The Gun Violence Archive, which has tracked gun violence in the US since 2013, includes incidents in which four or more victims are killed or injured in its “mass shooting” definition. There is no consensus on the definition of a “major” shooting, as described by the Heritage Foundation’s Severino.
Severino did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to a WIRED analysis of data provided by data scientist David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, there have been 48 school shootings with four or more victims—injured or killed—since the start of 2015. (Just six of those meet the FBI’s definition of a mass shooting.) Of the 48 shootings, 45 have no known connection to gang activity. Three were by shooters identified in public reporting as being or having been transgender or having undergone gender-affirming care. Six of the 48 shootings since 2015 do not list the gender of the shooter, primarily because their identity was unknown to authorities.