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Gorka on trans mass shooters
“We can’t stick with your facts because they’re not accurate,” Brianna Keilar told Sebastian Gorka.
On Sunday, CNN anchor Brianna Keilar challenged White House counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka after he advanced a debunked narrative that transgender people are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings.
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The exchange came days after a massacre in Minneapolis, where 23-year-old Robin Westman, who was trans, opened fire during a back-to-school mass at Annunciation Catholic School, killing two children and wounding at least 17 others before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. While investigators probe Westman’s motives for the Wednesday shooting, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey warned against scapegoating. “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity. Kids died. This needs to be about them,” he said.
Still, on national television, Gorka falsely argued there had been “seven” transgender shooters in recent years. Keilar pushed back, citing the U.S. Secret Service Threat Assessment Center’s review of 172 mass attacks from 2016 to 2020, which found 96 percent of perpetrators were cisgender men. “Are you missing the bigger picture here when you zero in on that instead of more broadly these school shooters as an epidemic?” she asked.
Related: Minneapolis mayor warns against ‘villainizing trans community’ after shooting leaves 2 children dead
Gorka rejected the data as “pseudo facts” and pointed instead to a list he had posted on X, formerly Twitter. It included Audrey Hale, who killed six in Nashville in 2023; Alec McKinney, who in 2019 carried out the STEM School Highlands Ranch attack in Colorado; and Snochia Moseley, who killed three at a Rite Aid warehouse in Maryland in 2018.
But he also listed Dylan Butler, a 17-year-old who killed one student in Perry, Iowa, despite no evidence that Butler identified as transgender; Anderson Lee Aldrich, who murdered five in Colorado Springs at Club Q in 2022, though Aldrich’s nonbinary claim is disputed given expressed anti-LGBTQ+ views; and Kimbrady Carriker, who killed five in Philadelphia in 2023, whom prosecutors said was not transgender.
Related: No, transgender and nonbinary people are not frequently mass shooters
When Keilar cited CNN’s own count of 32 major school shootings since 2020, only three of which involved trans shooters, Gorka replied, “Forgive me if I don’t go with CNN stats. CNN has proven itself to be wholly inaccurate.”
The Advocate has previously reported that out of more than 4,600 mass shootings between 2014 and 2024, at most six involved transgender suspects, just 0.128 percent. Cisgender men committed the overwhelming majority.
“We can’t stick with your facts because they’re not accurate,” Keilar told Gorka. “In fact, in two of the cases you’ve cited, there’s no evidence the individuals were trans.” Gorka shot back, accusing her of pushing an “agenda” and calling her corrections “fake news.”
Human Rights Campaign press secretary Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, said after the shooting that blaming trans people was “wrong, dangerous, and dehumanizing.”
Watch Brianna Keilar correct Sebastian Gorka on live TV below.
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