The Second Amendment isn’t just for people who express certain political shibboleths. It’s for every single American. Technically, it’s a human right that should extend across national borders, but most countries don’t see it that way.
We do, and that’s part of what makes this nation so great.
Wired, which tends to present gun rights as something to be freaked out about, at best, decided to do a little bit to look at it differently. They opted to focus on the hard left crowd that is into guns, which is fine. Then, of course, they became the victims.
This isn’t the story I set out to write.
I was going to talk about a pretty feel-good firearms competition I went to earlier this year, where trans and queer people made up about a quarter of participants and the unofficial rule was you’re not allowed to be a bigot. I was going to describe the strange and whimsical mix of subcultures people embraced there—like polyamory and Mad Max cosplay—wrapped up in pro-LGBT and Black Lives Matter patches.
Then Charlie Kirk was killed.
Suddenly I found myself wondering if I should write this story at all. If doing so would put my sources—gun-loving trans people in Trump’s America—in danger. I’m still going to talk about the things I just mentioned. But this story, even as I write, continues to get darker.
That’s right. Charlie Kirk was killed, but these folks are the real victims here.
There’s this whole thing about trans people being targeted for violence at some super-alarming rate, which just isn’t born out by the facts from what I’ve seen. Many of those who are killed each year are also involved in criminal activities, which is likely why they were killed. It had nothing to do with a trans identity.
Of course, not all are, and there are always examples to the contrary. Some people hate, and you can’t make them stop.
And, I suppose, having a competition that caters to them is one way to make sure they don’t run into it at a gun competition.
Organized by InRange TV’s Karl Kasarda, who is openly and vocally pro-LGBT among other things, and it seems the goal was to achieve just that, which is fine.
But then Wired gets stupid.
Seconds before he was shot to death, Charlie Kirk shared a myth about trans people propagating mass shootings. An attendee at one of his Turning Point USA events asked him, “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” to which Kirk replied, “Too many.” Numbers from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive find that there have been five confirmed trans or nonbinary mass shooters between January 2013 and September 2025, making trans people responsible for less than 0.1 percent of the 5,748 mass shootings the group tracked in that time period.
Neither that data, nor the fact that the suspect in Kirk’s killing is not trans, has stopped the right from using his death to further its crusade against transgender Americans. Bolstered by an early Wall Street Journal report, which cited an inaccurate federal memo saying authorities suspected there was “transgender and anti-fascist ideology” carved into some of the bullet casings at the scene, prominent Republicans have said trans people should be locked in mental institutions or not be allowed to use the internet. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, a policy blueprint for the Trump administration, is now calling for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to create a “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” category for domestic terrorism.
Of course, there were, in fact, anti-fascist and what sure looks like pro-trans messages on some of the rounds the alleged killer used, so I fail to see how that report was inaccurate.
Further, there are profound differences between a small handful calling for commitment of trans individuals and a mainstream opinion on the right.
As for the Gun Violence Archive’s claim, let’s take that with a grain of salt. Considering how they count mass shootings, compared to what most of us consider mass shootings, there’s going to be a discrepancy no matter what.
When it comes to the competitors, I honestly don’t care that they’re doing their own thing. If the reporting is accurate, some have been made to feel unwelcome at other events and ranges, which is stupid and should never happen. Strangely, one competitor who goes by Tacticool Girlfriend, who has talked about how toxic the gun community is before, argued that they’ve never encountered anything negative at other competitions, though TG also claims that people don’t “clock” them as trans.
Wired’s writer, Manisha Krishnan, suggests she’s been to a lot of competitions and ranges over the years. I’m not sure how true that is. She published a piece about the left turning to guns exactly a year and a day before this piece went live for a different publication, and there is precious little else. It looks like a topic she’s covered in her career, but not super often and not with any actual regularity, so I don’t know how much she’s around it in her own life.
But I do find it weird that Charlie Kirk was killed, and suddenly, the left is the victim in this whole mess.
The Second Amendment is for everyone, and I’m not about to change that belief, because the moment we start instituting purity tests to own a gun, someone will decide to raise the stakes so that any hated group–yes, that can include you and me–can’t get them. That’s never going to change for me.
I’m also not a fan of collectivism as a whole, which includes lumping every trans person into the same category as the deranged shooters we’ve noted recently. I know some devoted Second Amendment advocates and all-around good people who are trans, after all, and I can’t consider them anywhere close to the dipsticks in Minneapolis or Nashville.
But left-leaning shooters don’t suddenly become the victim because a left-leaning shooter shot someone they disagreed with. That’s not how it works, Wired.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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