\n<\/p>\n
In the wake<\/span> of Charlie Kirk\u2019s killing, the Republican policy apparatus went immediately to work. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, and its spinoff, the Oversight Project, issued a call for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to designate \u201cTransgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,\u201d or TIVE, as a domestic terrorism threat category. The push comes as President Donald Trump just signed an executive order that seeks to mobilize federal law enforcement against vaguely defined domestic terror networks.<\/p>\n The Heritage Foundation and Oversight Project document, which defines \u201ctransgender ideology\u201d as \u201ca belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable,” grounds its policy recommendations in a startling claim: \u201cExperts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n When WIRED asked for the data behind this claim, the Oversight Project did not respond; the Heritage Foundation pointed to a tweet from one of its vice presidents, Roger Severino, claiming that \u201c50% of major (non-gang) school shootings since 2015\u201d involve a transgender shooter or trans-related motive. Severino also lays out what appears to be his entire dataset: eight shootings, four of which, he claims, involve \u201ca trans-identifying shooter and\/or a likely trans-ideology related motivation.\u201d<\/p>\n The data tell a different story.<\/p>\n 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\u2014the 2019 shooter at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado and the Covenant School shooter in Nashville in 2023 among them\u2014have 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, but prioritized notoriety and infamy. In Colorado, investigators say one of the shooters, a transgender boy, cited bullying and long-standing mental health struggles as motivations.<\/p>\n 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, making classification uncertain. Police say the attack was fueled by hostility toward Jews, Christians, and minorities, along with a quest for notoriety. Prosecutors added the animus was sweeping, saying the shooter \u201cexpressed hate towards almost every group imaginable.\u201d<\/p>\n The K-12 database, the most comprehensive of its kind, does not include gender data for about 12.5 percent of school shooters since 2015, which only makes it more difficult to draw firm conclusions about broader patterns.<\/p>\n Other mass shootings at schools, including Parkland in 2018 and Uvalde in 2022, were carried out by young men with histories of grievance, misogyny, or violent ideation. None were tied to \u201ctransgender ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n The larger pattern, researchers say, points in the opposite direction: White supremacist, anti-government, and misogynist beliefs account for the lion\u2019s share of ideologically motivated gun violence. Targeting \u201ctransgender ideology\u201d as a terrorism category, they warn, confuses identity with ideology, risks licensing violence against anyone who defies gender norms, and shifts attention away from the real drivers of schoolyard violence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the wake of Charlie Kirk\u2019s killing, the Republican policy apparatus went immediately to work. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, and its spinoff, the Oversight Project, issued a call for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to designate \u201cTransgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,\u201d or TIVE, as a domestic terrorism threat category. The push comes as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[10682,14705,5665,4306,1092,11324,9924,2481],"class_list":{"0":"post-24142","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-bogus","9":"tag-classification","10":"tag-foundation","11":"tag-heritage","12":"tag-push","13":"tag-stat","14":"tag-terrorism","15":"tag-trans"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}