It's Thursday, August 28th, 2025 from Peachfish Productions.

It's the gist.

I'm Mike Peska.

A horrible school shooting in Minnesota.

And of course, the country responds by politicizing it to Trump White House, Christy Knoem,

emphasizing that the shooter was trans.

Trump supporters push a trans-terrorism narrative,

while LGBTQ advocates point out the rarity of trans people being behind mass killings.

It is true. The vast, vast majority of shooters are cisgender. But what does that really matter when the vast, vast

majority of people are cisgender? According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, about 1% of

people 13 and older are trans. There are some other surveys like the household pulse survey, puts it

almost exactly the same.

0.95% Gallup says 1.3%.

So even if 98 or 99% of shooters are cisgender, that alone doesn't tell you whether trans people are proportionally over or underrepresented.

And I don't think it's a terrible question to ask. Let's just get an actual

accurate answer. The problem is definitions and denominators. So what counts as a mass shooting?

Congress and some older FBI definitions, they've got out of the game, FBI has, but they

define mass murder as four more people killed

with a firearm. But in any circumstance, the gun violence index defines mass shooting as four

more people shot. I mean, that is a mass shooting, isn't it? It excludes the shooter, but you don't

need fatalities to qualify. A lot of times people will quote the,

or media will quote, the gun violence index to emphasize how the country is awash in mass

...