Debunking false claims about school shootings
The FBI is being ordered to look for "trans terrorists" instead of the evidence-based warning signs of a teen in crisis based on false claims by the authors of Project 2025.
It makes me proud of this work when my data can debunk a politically-motivated agenda that targets one of the smallest and most vulnerable groups in the United States.
Published today in WIRED Magazine: Heritage Foundation Uses Bogus Stat to Push a Trans Terrorism Classification
By inflating numbers and narrowing definitions, Heritage promotes a false link between transgender identity and violence in its push for the FBI to create a new terrorism category.
From the WIRED article:
The Heritage Foundation claimed: “Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.”
The data tell a different story.
Since 2015, at least four dozen shootings have taken place on school grounds, according to data from the K-12 School Shooting Database, which has tracked every incident involving a gun on school grounds since 1966.
Only three perpetrators in the database—the 2019 shooter at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado and the Covenant School shooter in Nashville in 2023 among them—have been credibly identified in public reporting as transgender or undergoing gender affirming care. Nashville police concluded the shooter there was not motivated by a clear political or ideological agenda. In Colorado, investigators say one of the shooters, a transgender boy, cited bullying and long-standing mental health struggles as motivations. In an August shooting, a 23-year-old individual opened fire outside Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. The shooter had legally changed their name and written about conflict over gender identity, but there is no public evidence they consistently identified as transgender.
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.
There have been 74 total active school shooter incidents since 2015; of those, three of the perpetrators have identified as transgender, according to Riedman’s data.
Experts say Heritage’s push not only distorts the data but also diverts attention from the extremist movements actually driving violence: nihilistic violent extremist networks, accelerationist neo-fascist movements, and lone actors motivated by any number of far right culture war grievances. Jonathan Lewis, a researcher at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, tells WIRED: “There is no academic publication I am aware of which has found any causal relationship between an individual’s gender identity and their radicalization or mobilization, nor which establishes any basis for such an argument.”
In other words, Heritage’s 50-percent claim is not just unsupported, it appears misleading by design, arbitrary in scope, and unscientific at its core.”
The timing is also notable, as federal resources for countering domestic terrorism are being steadily cut back.
The FBI has consistently diverted resources away from domestic terrorism investigations this year, pulling staff from specialized units and discounting tools long used to track extremist cases. By May, agents in field offices had been ordered to devote at least a third of their time to immigration enforcement instead, moving national security specialists into work far outside the bureau’s traditional role.
The administration previously gutted tens of millions of dollars from federal terrorism-prevention grants at the same time, shuttering key programs at the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. The Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 policy recommendations have been widely adopted by the Trump administration, is urging the FBI to create the “TIVE” terrorism designation amid increasingly fervent anti-trans propaganda from right-wing groups.
The Heritage Foundation did not respond to questions about the discrepancies.
Consequences of false information
This baseless claim comes just one week after we learned that the FBI was informed about online activity and mass shooting threats made by the 16-year-old Evergreen High (CO) school shooter but they didn’t investigate the case. If the FBI was looking at evidence-based research, they had 3 months to spot the warning signs of a school shooting plot and stop it before a kid opened fire inside the cafeteria at lunch time.
While the FBI is searching for imaginary threats, there is an entire online community that glorifies violence and white nationalism that is radicalizing teens including the last four high school students who committed pre-planned attacks at their schools in the past year. This content has absolutely nothing to do with being transgender…in fact, these online groups are anti-trans and use coordinated online trolling to target trans people on social media.
If the senior government officials who direct our largest investigative agencies have them chasing fictional threats created to fuel their political culture war, the FBI will continue to miss the actual warning signs of violence that can stop kids from being shot inside their schools.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.