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Comment by thelopa | Hacker News Reader

This narrative about trans shooters is disconnected from reality. If you take every trans shooter in the last decade, you get less than 10… out of thousands. For context, last year America has nearly 700 mass shootings. Trans people are actually under represented in mass shootings. Estimates put trans people at up to 1% of the population. We would naively expect 7 shooters last year to be trans, but none were. Saying that the recent shooter is part of a trend of transgender shooters requires outright ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

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The desperation to argue against a straw man is real. If trans people went from no school shootings to one in 2020 and one in 2023 there may or may not be a "trend" but it's still worth finding out why that is happening.

Edit:

re pupptailwags: Yes we should be examining whenever people are engaging in violence, factors behind that happening. I'm quite certain, unlike assertion made below, that people indeed have studied the qualities of males in particular engaging in this kind of violence.

rethelopa: I was replying to a comment talking about why something (male disposition to this kind of violence) hadn't been studied; it has.

[note I'm rate limited, which is reason for replying this way]

You optimize for the common case, not the uncommon one. Shouldn’t we figure out why shootings in general are happening rather than fixating on a specific case because it involved an unpopular minority group?

I think searching for a general common solution is precisely why we are getting nowhere. It may be there are some "unpopular" opinions that turn out to be factors. Many small pieces make a large one, and important hints often come in unexpected places.

But, again, why are you focusing on a group that is statistically less likely to commit mass shootings compared to the average person? Even if you find some root cause for trans shooters, you’d be, at best, eliminating what amounts to about 0.1% of cases. Why not look at groups that are over represented?

One day I'm in a coal mine and 1 canary dies, the next day 100 canaries die. I probably think the coal or some mineral in the mine just kills canaries.

Eventually a dog dies. Now I start wondering "Well dogs are only 1% of the dead animals, may as well not focus on that..." I may miss out on an important observation.

If your presumption is true, that trans are more robust against these kind of acts, now I'm wondering. Maybe unhinged poorly socialized young males are the canaries and trans are yet something new. What's wrong in the coal mine and what can I learn by focusing on the newest subjects.

We didn't apply this standard to all men when we went from no school shootings to one school shooting in 1840. I don't see a reason why we should apply it to another gender.

I’m assuming I’m the “assertion made below”. I made no such claim. Let me rephrase it.

There have been 8 mass shootings in America in the last 7 days. No one was running to twitter to speculate about their causes. No politicians were raising concerns about troubling trends. The shootings were going completely unremarked on in national politics… until a shooter happened to be trans.

If you want to speculate that commentators and politicians are giving the other incidents the same attention, we would literally never hear the end of it. On average, almost 2 mass shootings happen per day. But, for some reason, those incidents weren’t given national attention. Curious.

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