Given the tsunami of news demanding your attention, you might have missed an interesting trial balloon launched by the Department of Justice last week. Officials briefed reporters on preliminary discussions among DOJ top brass to ban transgender people from buying guns. This was in the wake of last month’s horrendous Minneapolis church shooting by a deranged person who identified as transgender and who murdered two children and injured at least 17 others.
The first outlet to report on the talks was the very Trump-friendly Daily Wire. The salient political issue, according to reporter Mary Margaret Olohan, was that, “The move would undoubtedly infuriate those on the left who believe that men can become women and women can become men — and that people who identify as transgender are not mentally ill but merely living in the wrong body.”
It’s certainly true that the trial balloon irked many on the left. GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and similar civil-rights groups were also appalled.
Among the bothered was a very different kind of civil rights group. The National Rifle Association, which describes itself as America’s “longest-standing civil rights organization,” responded in a statement: “The NRA supports the Second Amendment rights of all law-abiding Americans to purchase, possess and use firearms. NRA does not, and will not, support any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.”
Reading this Daily Wire exclusive, you might not have foreseen that gun rights groups would have a problem with the idea of stripping any category of people of a constitutional right. The issue didn’t come up. Phrases like “gun rights” or “Second Amendment” go unmentioned. The news was about owning the libs by declaring all transgender people mentally ill and therefore barred from buying firearms.
Given that the NRA and other groups shot the DOJ’s trial balloon out of the sky, it will probably go nowhere, not least because the move is wildly unconstitutional.
So why pay it any more attention?
For starters, whatever one thinks about transgenderism, or even the concept of “trans-terrorism” as pushed by the administration and various MAGA influencers, the idea that the executive branch can unilaterally deprive a class of people—no matter how disfavored—of a constitutional right is worth notice.
For those who are hostile to gun rights, this point should still be obvious. Just replace the Second Amendment with the First. Can the president announce that transgender people—or Muslims, Catholics, et al.—no longer have the right to speak or worship freely?
The rhetoric around “trans-terrorism” is, I think, evidence of a kind of hysteria that has gotten way ahead of the facts. I also think, like all moral panics, there is a kernel of truth to be found. There has been an increase in mass shootings by mentally disturbed transgender individuals. But no matter how you crunch the numbers, the idea that transgender people as a class should be denied their gun rights based on five confirmed transgender perpetrators is ludicrous.
After all, according to some estimates, roughly 1 in 4 mass shooters have some military experience or training. That doesn’t mean military service makes one a mass shooter, and any attempt to deprive veterans of their gun rights has historically been met with massive pushback from conservatives.
Still, this short chapter is interesting for other reasons. The Trump administration is terminally online. It takes its cues from social media and sites like the Daily Wire. That the DOJ and the Daily Wire were so swept up in the feeding frenzy that it considered an obviously unconstitutional policy—even for clicks—would be surprising were it not so, well, unsurprising these days.
The NRA’s announcement is also a sign that some in the Trump coalition still have the capacity to think beyond the horizon of a news cycle or the remainder of the Trump years. I have no clue what the leadership of the NRA thinks about trans people. But what they do know is that precedents established by a friendly president can be exploited by a future unfriendly one. A momentary victory in the culture war is not worth the price. (Indeed, for gun control activists, this might be remembered as a missed opportunity. Establishing the principle that presidents have sweeping authority to ban guns would have been a massive victory, though the political and moral cost would have been enormous, too.)
Tragically, none of this gets us any closer to any kind of solution to the problem of mass shootings. But maybe learning that such solutions won’t come from pandering to hysteria is a step in the right direction.
