Claim by End Wokeness:
A viral chart posted on August 28, 2025, claimed that transgender individuals committed a disproportionately high number of mass shootings in the U.S. from 2015 to 2025, based on a “mass shooting rates by demographic” graph that showed trans/nonbinary shooters with the highest rate per million population.
Explanation:
The chart circulating on X.com provided no sourcing and was not supported by any reputable mass shooting database. In fact, organizations that systematically track such data—including the Gun Violence Archive and The Violence Project—confirmed that the numbers were inaccurate.
Gun Violence Archive’s director, Mark Bryant, stated that from 2013 to 2025, only five out of 5,729 mass shootings involved transgender perpetrators—representing just 0.087% of all incidents. Similarly, The Violence Project found only one confirmed transgender mass shooter in its database from 1966 to 2024. These findings contradict the viral chart’s implication that transgender individuals were significantly overrepresented among mass shooters.
Additionally, research from the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice confirms that the majority of mass shooters are cisgender white men. The chart not only misrepresents transgender data but also distorts the racial and gender distribution of mass shooting perpetrators overall.
Conclusion:
Fact or Fiction? Fiction. There is no evidence to support the claim that transgender people are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings. Verified data from established archives shows they represent a fraction of a percent of such incidents.
Read More
Do you appreciate our work? Please consider one of the following ways to sustain us.
or
None of this is properly sourced. The article claims “Gun Violence Archive’s director, Mark Bryant, stated that from 2013 to 2025, only five out of 5,729 mass shootings involved transgender perpetrators—representing just 0.087% of all incidents.” What publication or study actually determined this. The fact-check would be much more useful if it linked to studies that refuted the claim.
Dallas Carter, I applaud your interest in sourcing, and your accurate quote of the above article. I wish more people were so careful.
For the too-long, didn’t read version, see my last paragraph.
That said, it took me just a few minutes to find a good bit of useful information relevant to your question. I started by clicking the “Mark Bryant” link in the segment you quoted, which took me to a BBC article. Maybe you saw it, too. Before even reading that, I took a fresh look at MBFC’s assessment of the BBC. Bias: to the center of left-center. Factual Reporting: high. Source credibility: high.
Keeping an open mind about MBFC’s own potential bias (we all have some; that can’t be ruled out), that’s nearly as good as it gets.
Moving step-by-step toward empirical evidence (which, for big parts of the vast majority of news stories is largely unavailable — as you seem to recognize), I looked at their assessment of the Gun Violence Archive. Turns out they’re also center of left-center, high factual reporting, high credibility.
MBFC provides a quote from GVA’s “About” page, but also a direct link to it — which I followed (skipping the middleman — always a good idea to avoid not just biases but potential errors). To save you or others time, I’m not copying the whole thing…
“The Gun Violence Archive is an online archive of gun violence incidents collected from over 7,500 law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources daily in an effort to provide near-real time data about the results of gun violence. GVA is an independent data collection and research group with no affiliation with any advocacy organization.
Mission Statement
Gun Violence Archive (GVA) is a not for profit corporation formed in 2013 to provide free online public access to accurate information about gun-related violence in the United States. GVA will collect and check for accuracy, comprehensive information about gun-related violence in the U.S. and then post and disseminate it online… It is hoped that this information will inform and assist those engaged in discussions and activities concerning gun violence… All we ask is to please provide proper credit for use of Gun Violence Archive data and advise us of its use.”
Seems quite reasonable to me — yet I remain open-minded.
There are multiple other links I could have followed, provided by MBFC, BBC, and GVA, and either of us could further investigate every link in this chain.
In short, it appears to me there was no “publication or study” other than from GVA is the source. MBFC did link to them. And GVA did refute the claim. They are the ones who studied this, and not for nothing, others have confirmed it. You can choose, for whatever reason, not to trust GVA, BBC, MBFC, etc. — and I always advise a healthy level of skepticism for ANY source on which we all depend for news — but each one of them has provided information about themselves, their methodologies, and/or their sources. So I don’t see how you can say “None of this is properly sourced.”
Moreover, the original claim isn’t properly sourced! You’re putting the burden of proof in the wrong place. Right at the top of this article, MBFC states, “The chart circulating on X.com provided no sourcing…” If you require sourcing for the refutation, you should require sourcing for the claim. That, after all, is the part that’s childishly easy, and it’s precisely the reason so many disreputable news outlets and random unknown people inject random assertions into the “news” stream in the first place! To make people chase ghosts!
My second-to-last paragraph was unfinished, as you can tell from the awkward first sentence. But hopefully you get the gist. I was in the process, and obviously forgot to finish, of adding that The Violence Project was also cited as a source refuting this sourceless claim.
How can you argue or debate with a party that refuses to accept reality, pulls funding from and buries anyone producing studies they don’t like, fires people for compiling reports they don’t like, and actively jails people for disagreeing?