Justice Department Considering Ban on Transgendered People Owning Firearms

Matthew Boyle – 4 Sep 2025 Washington, DC – Breitbart

My cmnt: This is the 2nd major Christian school attacked by trans people with guns for no other reason than that the trans blame Christians for the miserable lives they have chosen.

Senior officials at the U.S. Department of Justice have held multiple meetings in recent days to consider a possible federal ban of transgendered individuals from owning firearms, Breitbart News has learned.

Multiple sources familiar with the matter, including one official inside the DOJ, confirmed to Breitbart News that the Office of Legal Council (OLC)—which advises the Attorney General on legal matters—has held several such meetings since the tragic shooting, allegedly by a transgendered individual, that killed 2 children at a Minneapolis Catholic school and injured 21 others.

This legal question of banning firearm ownership for transgendered individuals would focus on whether these people suffering from gender dysphoria are in fact mentally ill and therefore should be denied firearm ownership while they are unstable and unwell. It would be a major escalation to see the federal government curtail Second Amendment protections for a big group of people, but in the case of transgendered people it is a place that many believe makes sense, which is why some top conservatives, such as Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, have said the government should do this.

“Democrats have called for common sense gun laws for a long time – this seems pretty common sense to me,” a source inside DOJ told Breitbart News.

While any decision is not yet final, the fact these meetings are happening seems to suggest there may be movement inside the Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi towards taking some kind of step here.

Vice President JD Vance visited Minneapolis to meet with families of the children the transgendered alleged shooter murdered last week, and with the recovering victims who lived. Vance’s opponent in last year’s election, the 2024 Democrat nominee for Vice President and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has made Minnesota a “trans refuge.” Walz has in the aftermath of the shooting called for more gun control generally, and Vance said in response that people want to stop the shootings that keep happening.

“I’m not going to tell the Minnesota lawmakers or the governor exactly how they should respond to this tragedy. I think that…there’s a strong desire from across the political spectrum to do something so that these shootings are less common,” Vance said.

Robin Westman is Latest Transgender Mass Shooter to Spark National Debate

Published Aug 28, 2025 at 8:01 AM EDT Updated Aug 29, 2025 at 8:31 AM EDT

By Khaleda Rahman – National Correspondent for Newsweek

The Context

Authorities said Westman shot dozens of rounds through the windows toward children sitting in the pews during Mass at the Annunciation Catholic School on Wednesday. Two children, aged 8 and 10, died. Fourteen other children and three elderly parishioners were wounded, but expected to survive. Westman was found dead by suicide, police said.

What To Know

Benny Johnson, a right wing commentator, wrote on X that “one thing is VERY clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder.”

Johnson’s post cited six shootings besides Wednesday’s incident since 2018 that were allegedly committed by transgender or nonbinary perpetrators.

“The pattern is undeniable: Today’s Annunciation Catholic Church shooter identified as trans. The Nashville Christian shooter identified as trans. The Lakewood Church shooter identified as trans. The Colorado Springs shooter identified as non binary. The Denver shooter identified as trans. The Aberdeen shooter identified as trans. The Iowa high school shooter was a trans activist.”

The nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, which began collecting data on gun violence in the U.S. in 2013, has recorded more than 4,100 mass shootings since the start of 2018. The GVA defines a mass shooting as four or more shot or killed in a single incident.

But only three of the mass shootings cited in Johnson’s tweet, not counting Wednesday’s incident, were carried out by individuals who were reportedly transgender: the 2023 shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, the 2019 shooting at a Denver-area charter school and the 2018 shooting at a Rite Aid warehouse in Aberdeen, Maryland.

Police debunked claims that the person who opened fire inside Lakewood church last year was transgender. And authorities have not confirmed the gender identity of Dylan Butler, the teenager who opened fire inside an Iowa school last year, though conservatives seized on screenshots from Butler’s social media accounts to claim he was transgender. And in the case of the Colorado Springs shooting at a gay club, suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich’s lawyers wrote in court documents that their client identified as nonbinary but reportedly later used he/him pronouns in court.

Calculating statistics when it comes to mass shootings does vary since organizations define incidents differently.

And there is “unfortunately no way for us to quantify how rare shootings more generally perpetrated by transgender people are because this is not information that is collected in crime statistics,” Schildkraut said.

“National crime data, like that National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) from the FBI—as well as mortality data for that matter—captures and reports data based on biological sex, which means yesterday’s shooter likely would be reported as male.”

According to The Violence Project, which records data on mass shootings dating back to 1966, less than 1 percent of mass shootings have been committed by transgender individuals.

The project focuses on mass shootings in public where four or more people were killed, not counting the shooter. Per that methodology, the 2023 shooting at a Christian school in Nashville is the only case of a shooting by a transgender person included in the database.

An update from the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law, in August 2025 estimates that about 2.86 million people age 13 or over—roughly 1 percent of the U.S. population over that age—identify as transgender. That includes around 2.1 million adults (0.8 percent) and around 724,000 youth ages 13–17 (3.3 percent).

Using the GVA definition, the U.S. recorded 4,134 mass shootings since January 1, 2018. The three confirmed incidents involving transgender shooters account for around 0.07 percent of these, or around 1 in 1,378. This is far below transgender people’s roughly 1 percent share of the population age 13 or older. Even if the latest case is included, the proportion rises to only around 0.1 percent.

What People Are Saying

Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, told Newsweek: “Mass public shootings, like what happened yesterday in Minneapolis, are exceedingly rare (less than 0.5 percent of all crimes that occur annually). Mass public shootings by individuals identifying as transgender are a mere fraction (likely an even smaller percentage of incidents). Therefore, the fact that yesterday’s perpetrator identified as transgender is exceedingly rare.

“This cannot be overstated at a time when people’s gender identity is under attack, as it risks criminalizing a largely nonviolent population who are often the victims of crime rather than the perpetrators—same as why we need to be mindful of criminalizing mental illness (individuals with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of crime rather than the perpetrators).”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote on X: “We have confirmation that the shooter at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, MN was a 23-year-old man, claiming to be transgender. This deranged monster targeted our most vulnerable: young children praying in their first morning Mass of the school year.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said at a news conference on Wednesday: “I have heard about a whole lot of hate that’s being directed at our trans community. Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity … Kids died today. This needs to be about them.”

What’s Next

The shooting remains under investigation as authorities search for the shooter’s motive.