In the latest installment of “Things That Don’t Add Up, but Get Retweeted Anyway,” conservative Twitter personalities have once again declared that transgender people are the root cause of America’s mass shootings, potholes, inflation, and the fact that McDonald’s ice cream machines never work.
This, despite a pesky little statistic: fewer than one-tenth of one percent of mass shooters are transgender. That’s right—less than the odds of being struck by lightning while simultaneously holding a winning lottery ticket.
But statistics are boring, and boring doesn’t go viral. Instead, conservative influencers have decided that reality itself is a left-wing conspiracy. “If 99.9% of shooters aren’t trans, then obviously the media is covering for them,” tweeted one blue-check pundit whose profile picture is a bald eagle wearing Oakleys. “Do the math, people!” (Math, notably, has not been returning their calls.)
Another commentator insisted, “Even if there’s only one trans shooter in the history of humanity, that’s one too many! This proves a cultural epidemic.” By that logic, we should probably also ban middle-aged men named Chad from Ohio, because, statistically, they’re far more likely to make the FBI’s most wanted list than anyone at a Pride parade.
Meanwhile, experts point out that the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are cisgender men, but that’s not as exciting to tweet about. After all, no one’s going to get 20,000 retweets screaming, “Once again, Chad from Ohio strikes again!”
Until then, conservative Twitter will keep furiously hammering away at keyboards, fighting both facts and fractions. Somewhere, a statistician is quietly sobbing into a spreadsheet, wondering how we got here.
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