Gun Rights Advocates Attempt to Silence the Causes of Gun Violence

Following each high-visible episode of gun violence in the United States, politicians and other community and national leaders spout their often-repeated worn-out platitudes and false claims regarding the actual causes of this lethal epidemic plaguing the country. Their words all-to-often result in the silencing of the root causes of the problem.

“Sending my best wishes and prayers.”

Of course, people of goodwill and compassion express this sentiment to people and communities suffering trauma and grief. This can help to begin the often-long healing process at a time of unfathomable tragedy by providing essential solace to survivors. It also gives those of us who feel powerless during these occasions at least a limited sense of standing with others. This expression, though, falls far short of a solution, which morphs into mere platitude when those in positions of power fail to work toward real solutions.

“This is not the time to talk about politics.”

After virtually every firearms-related slaughter, a common pattern has emerged: when advocates rightly raise issues of safety regulations, politicians retreat to their deflective tactic of reciting that “now is not the time.” Moments pass leading to the next political issue (for example, healthcare or storm disaster relief) pushing gun violence out of the headlines as action is not taken. Then the next high-visibility gun massacre blares out while politicians again claim that “now is not the time,” and the cycle repeats ad infinitum.

Some of these leaders offer their prognosis regarding the cause of the latest incident.

“Transgender people are to blame.”

I wrote an editorial commentary about the recent mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and school outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota killing two children, 8 and 10 years old, and injuring another 14 children and 4 adults. I listed several policy options for common sense for gun reforms that if taken collectively could severely reduce the carnage.

On one of my social media platforms, a participant summarily rejected my reforms and, instead, asserted his assumptions behind the alleged shooter’s motivations:

“No thank you,” he responded to my plan. “We do need to investigate why so many of these mass shooters identify as transgender and why they often select faith based institutions for their evil deeds.”

This respondent and several others have seen reports that the alleged shooter identified as “transgender,” and they have emphasized this to weaponize identity as causation.

In my attempt to decouple this man from his false conspiracies, I reported the finding from multiple reputable research sources, which all reported that the rate of mass shooters in the United States who identify as transgender is very low ranging from under 1% to only a very few cases. In fact, these sources found, instead, that the overwhelming majority of mass shootings are perpetrated by cisgender males.

The Violence Project, a nonpartisan research center, for example, found in its analysis of 200 mass shootings between 1999 and 2024, that only one was perpetrated by a transgender person.

The executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, stated in 2024 that transgender suspects accounted for less than 0.11% of all mass shootings in the United States over the past decade.

In their assessment of 173 mass attacks between 2016 and 2020, the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center found that 2% of perpetrators identified as transgender having been assigned female at birth but identifying as male at the time of the attacks. The vast majority of attackers (96%) were cisgender male.

I brought these reports to the attention of the respondent on social media, at which point he dropped his assertion that a large percent of mass shooters were transgender. He then immediately turned his blame to the alleged perpetrator’s history of rampant antisemitism, and he gave me a stern warning:

“I think you [should] take a second look Warren,” he wrote. “And no Jew in their right mind should endorse gun control. As a community, we need to be armed and ready to defend ourselves.”

And here is the real problem! Once we present a valid research-based explanation to disprove their morally misguided and false explanations for the vast number of incidents of gun violence in the United States, they will either dismiss our research or they will immediately find another reason to justify their failure to go to the root causes for the horrific tragedies that hit our communities everyday of every year: easy access to firearms.

“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

Actually, people with guns kill people more often and at significantly higher rates than people who don’t have guns. Let’s take a comparative example.

Before and up to 1996, Australia had relatively high rates of murder, but an incident at Port Arthur, Tasmania, April 28, 1996, was the proverbial straw that broke the poor camel’s back. On that date, a man opened fire on a group of tourists killing 35 and wounding another 23. The massacre was the worst mass murder in Australia’s history.

Taking decisive action, newly-elected conservative Prime Minister, John Howard, negotiated a bipartisan deal between the national, state, and local governments in enacting comprehensive gun safety measures, which included a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and laws prohibiting private firearms sales, mandatory registration by owners of all weapons, and the requirement that all potential buyers of guns at the time of purchase give a “genuine reason” other than general or overarching self-defense without documentation of necessity.

By 1996, polls showed overwhelming public support of approximately 90% for the new measures. And though firearms-related injuries and death have not totally come to an end, according to the Washington Post,homicides by firearms fell by 59% between 1995 and 2006 with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides, and a 65% reduction in gun-related suicides.

Other studies found significant drops in robberies involving firearms, and contrary to fears by some, no increase in the overall number of home invasions. In the decade preceding the Port Arthur massacre, Australia recorded 11 mass shootings. No mass shootings have occurred for over two decades after the measures went into effect.

“It’s a mental health issue.”

When politicians assert a cause of gun violence, they invariably lay blame on people with mental illness. Some people talk of “delusional killers” or “mentally ill criminals” for the violence. While some leaders have called for a “national registry” of all persons diagnosed with mental illness, such a proposal has faced overwhelming criticism by mental health advocates over concerns about stigmatization and discrimination.

Politicians are merely scapegoating an entire group of people rather than acknowledging the real causes. And while these same politicians call for increased support systems for people with mental health issues, this Republican-dominated Congress has acted to reduce support systems.

On the issue of keeping guns out of the hands of people with emotional and mental health problems, in December 2016, the Obama administration released policy guidelines mandating that people receiving Social Security payments for severe mental illnesses and those found incapable of managing their finances undergo FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Checks if they request to purchase a weapon.

Congress, however, overturned the policy, mostly on party lines. President Trump signed the measure into law one month after taking office during his first term, even though following every mass shooting, he refers to these instances as a “mental health problem” as he did again after 17 students and their teachers were killed in Parkland, Florida.

In fact, however, reports show clearly that mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent less than 1% of all yearly gun-related homicides. In addition, Columbia University’s Paul Applebaum and Duke’s Jeffrey Swanson found that “only 3-5% of violent acts are attributable to serious mental illness, and most do not involve guns.”

“Fatherlessness in homes of boys and young men”

Another explanation has gained attention on the political right: fatherless homes. Susan L. M. Goldberg of PJMedia, for example, argues:

“Issue number one that no one in the mainstream media or government wants to acknowledge: fatherlessness. Specifically, the impact of fatherlessness on the boys who grew up to become school shooters.”

Goldberg refers to Warren Farrell and John Grey’s book The Boy Crisis. She wrote:

“Minimal or no father involvement, whether due to divorce, death, or imprisonment, is common to Adam Lanza, Elliott Rodgers, Dylan Roof and Stephen Paddock….In the case of 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, he was adopted at birth. His adoptive dad died when Nikolas was much younger, and doubtless the challenges of this fatherlessness was compounded by the death of his adoptive mom three and a half months ago.”

By implication, the right is implying that women-headed households are inferior to those that are male-headed, and, ironically, that a family headed by two fathers in partnership is the best – though they have heartedly disputed this.

Hypermasculinity Combined with Widescale Availability of Firearms

In the over 50,000 shooting incidents in the United States, including approximately 372 categorized as “mass shootings” of four or more victims, men, mostly cisgender white men committed the overwhelming majority. And murder is primarily a male act in 90% of the cases when the gender of the perpetrator is known. In mass shootings, 98%+ are enacted by males.

But regulations on firearms challenge the promises of a patriarchal system based on notions of hyper-masculinity with the elements taken to the extreme of control, domination over others and the environment, competitiveness, autonomy, rugged individualism, strength, toughness, forcefulness, and decisiveness, and, of course, never having to ask for help or assistance.

Concepts of cooperation and community responsibility are pushed to the sidelines or often discarded. This connected to the easy legal access to firearms presents a recipe for disaster playing itself out so many times in the United States that it has become routine.

Why do politicians and many residents of the U.S. continue to deny, deflect, diffuse, dispose, and dispense with raising issues revolving around the massive and virtually unrestricted availability of firearms, some reaching military-grade capability, as the prime reason for the epidemic of gun violence in the United States?

But to paraphrase the great political strategist James Carvill: “It’s the guns stupid!”

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