It takes a special kind of political contortionist to wrap yourself in the Second Amendment like it’s a Snuggie, spend years handing out assault rifles like Halloween candy, and then suddenly decide — wait a minute — maybe some people shouldn’t have guns after all. But leave it to Donald Trump, the master of irony so thick it clogs your arteries, to decide the one group of Americans who should be disarmed are… transgender people. Not domestic abusers. Not the usual army of corn-fed white guys who leave manifestos stapled to Reddit posts before spraying bullets into schools, malls, and Waffle Houses. Nope. The problem is apparently “the trannies.”

In the wake of the Minneapolis Catholic church shooting, where a 23-year-old transgender woman killed two children and injured 21 others, conservative media has found its new favorite bogeyman. Not guns. Never guns. Guns are sacrosanct. Guns are freedom incarnate, practically a holy sacrament in the American civic religion. No, the problem — we are told — is that “unnatural” people have been allowed to arm themselves. And like a drunk stumbling onto a new conspiracy theory, the Trump administration is now reportedly weighing proposals to limit transgender Americans’ right to possess firearms. Because nothing screams “principled conservative consistency” like stripping people of both their civil rights and their Second Amendment rights in the same breath.

A Crisis Manufactured on Cable News

Let’s get something straight — statistically speaking, mass shootings in America are overwhelmingly committed by cisgender men. We’re talking 97–98 percent. The kind of guys who storm statehouses in camo because they can’t get laid and their mother stopped doing their laundry. If Republicans wanted to actually cut down on gun massacres, they’d restrict the demographic most responsible: straight men with fragile egos and an internet connection. But that would mean going after their own voters.

Of course Fox News, OANN, and their carnival-barker cousins don’t care about statistics. They care about narrative. And the narrative is simple: America’s moral rot isn’t the culture of fetishizing violence, or the 400 million civilian firearms floating around like confetti. No, it’s the existence of transgender people. One shooter equals a pattern. A blip becomes a pandemic. The talking heads know what sells: outrage, scapegoats, and red meat for the base.

Fox in particular has perfected this game. When a cis white guy shoots up a school, the chyron reads “troubled loner.” When a trans person does it, it’s “proof” of an epidemic. Every time Laura Ingraham twitches, some soccer dad in Missouri nods and mutters, “Makes sense, it’s the hormones.” That’s how you turn one tragedy into a cultural wedge issue: rinse, repeat, scream about bathrooms, and cash the ad checks.

Here’s reality: trans people are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. They’re beaten, harassed, denied jobs, tossed out of housing, murdered in hate crimes, and blamed for society’s collapse by politicians who can’t tie their shoes without corporate sponsorship. The idea of a wave of trans mass shooters is as absurd as it gets.

Trump’s Selective Love Affair With the Second Amendment

But suddenly, because one shooter was trans, the God Emperor of the MAGAverse is ready to gut the sacred Second Amendment. Not for himself, not for his golf buddies, not for the Proud Boys, but for a group of people he already treats as punchlines. It’s the political equivalent of a guy who beats his wife every day and then screams bloody murder because she raised her voice once.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Trump doesn’t care about safety. He doesn’t care about guns except as props to wave at rallies. What he cares about is scapegoating. He’s already banned trans people from the military. He’s ordered prisons to shove trans inmates back into facilities based on their birth gender, guaranteeing more abuse and violence. And now he’s testing the waters for stripping away Second Amendment rights—because the only “constitutional rights” that matter are the ones that belong to straight white men in red hats.

If this goes anywhere, it’ll be another notch on his “own the libs” belt. If it doesn’t, it’ll still serve its purpose: more headlines about “dangerous trans shooters,” more fuel for the base, more distraction from the reality that America’s real gun problem is the NRA-owned Congress that refuses to lift a finger to stop massacres.

Guns Don’t Kill People, But Apparently Gender Identity Does

Here’s the kicker: none of this will stop mass shootings. You could bar every trans person in America from owning so much as a Super Soaker, and the next 20 massacres would still be carried out by cisgender men with AR-15s they bought at Cabela’s while drunk on Monster energy drinks. This isn’t about safety. It’s about scapegoating. It’s about creating a convenient villain so Republicans can keep pocketing NRA checks while pretending they’re “doing something.”

The NRA, of course, won’t say a word. If Trump announced tomorrow that all trans people should be catapulted into the ocean, Wayne LaPierre would just nod and pass the hat around. The NRA’s guiding philosophy has always been simple: guns for me, not for thee. As long as their donor base gets to keep fondling rifles like comfort blankets, they couldn’t care less who gets thrown under the bus.

The same people who say “you can’t punish law-abiding gun owners for the actions of a few criminals” now want to punish an entire community of law-abiding Americans for the actions of one. The same crowd that calls every gun law “the first step to tyranny” is suddenly cool with government lists and exclusions—so long as it’s trans people who pay the price.

Déjà Vu: The “Super-Predator” Panic Recycled

If all this feels familiar, it should. In the 1990s, America went through a moral panic about “super-predators” — supposedly feral, violent Black youth who were destined to overrun society unless we locked them all up. It was junk science wrapped in racism, and it led directly to mass incarceration. Fast forward three decades, and Republicans are running the same playbook with trans people.

Take a rare case, blow it out of proportion, and use it to justify stripping away rights. Back then, the solution was mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws. Now, it’s bathroom bans, sports bans, and — apparently — gun bans. Different minority, same old scapegoating.

Trump and his cronies aren’t interested in stopping violence. They’re interested in political theater. They want to keep guns flowing to their base, while stripping rights from people who already get shoved to the margins. They want to turn a tragedy into another excuse to kick down instead of up.

The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast: the self-proclaimed defenders of the Constitution are now openly considering tearing it up, not for national security, not for public safety, but to settle a culture-war score.

And here’s the truth they don’t want to face: if you really wanted to reduce mass shootings, you’d regulate guns. Full stop. But regulating guns would piss off the only constituency they actually care about. So instead, they’ll go after trans people — because they’re easier targets, because they can’t fight back with lobbyists, and because cruelty has always been the point.