Last week, reports circulated that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is considering a rule change that would ban transgender people from owning firearms. But the idea has garnered criticism from gun advocates both in Colorado and nationally, with one saying such a ban would be “flagrantly illegal.”
This follows the deadly mass shooting last month at a Minneapolis Catholic church. Law enforcement has identified the alleged perpetrator as a transgender woman.
The proposed rule change would revolve around using existing federal statutes barring people deemed mentally unfit from owning firearms. According to Mary Margaret Olohan, a White House correspondent for the far-right news outlet The Daily Wire, “a senior DOJ official” said that “We’re not playing semantics with words like dysphoria,” before using an anti-trans slur. This was reported by journalist S. Baum at the trans-focused news blog Erin in the Morning.
A day after the story broke, the National Rifle Association (NRA) posted a tweet stating that it “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.” Though nothing in the tweet mentioned transgender people, a spokesman confirmed to CNN that the tweet was in reference to the DOJ’s policy discussions.
Ian Escalante, the Executive Director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (RMGO), a group which has lobbied against gun control laws in Colorado and in some cases successfully sued to overturn them, told the Colorado Times Recorder his group would also oppose such a ban.
“Rocky Mountain Gun Owners opposes ALL attempts to disarm Americans. If the government can infringe on the rights of one group, all of our constitutionally protected liberties are put at risk,” Escalante said in an emailed statement.
The Colorado State Shooters Association, Colorado’s statewide chapter of the NRA, was also contacted for comment, but did not respond before the deadline. This story will be updated with any response received.
Following the shooting, many conservative media figures have claimed, falsely, that the incident was part of a “pattern of violence” by trans people. In Colorado, those names have included U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and former U.S. Senate candidate and media figure Deborah Flora.
Guest-hosting the KHOW radio show “Ryan Schuiling Live” last week, Flora referenced right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo’s claims of rising violence by transgender people.
“Andy Ngo, many of you know him, no pun intended there. He’s been boldly as a member of the LGB community speaking out about what he sees as a very unprecedented rise in the last four years, of these type of attacks coming from those that are in the transgender or non-binary community,” said Flora, who now serves on the national board of the extreme anti-trans group Moms for Liberty. “Now once again, let me say this because people love to jump and attack. I am not saying there’s a direct correlation. I’m saying that it is okay for us to ask and look at the details.”
If one actually looks at the details, they won’t find anything resembling a pattern. Shootings by trans people are statistically rare in the context of mass shootings across the U.S.
Flora went on to reference the November, 2023 Club Q shooting, claiming that alleged shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich was transgender. Aldrich’s lawyers wrote in court documents that their client used they/them pronouns, but later referred to Aldrich in court with he/him pronouns.
Besides that, she listed three other shootings by trans people since 2018. That makes five cases over seven years – barely more than a drop in the bucket compared to the overall statistics of mass violence in the U.S. According to the Gun Violence Archive, hundreds of mass shootings are documented in the U.S. every year.
Boebert was much more direct: shortly after the shooting, she tweeted, “I’ve yet to see a single Democrat acknowledge the pattern of transgender violence in this country … It’s time to stop coddling insane people in this country.”
The fearmongering perpetuated by Boebert and others has since led the Trump DOJ to float the Minneapolis shooting, as she would say, “as a pretext to disarm law-abiding Americans.”
Dave Kopel, a 2nd Amendment expert at the Independence Institute, a Colorado-based think tank which advocates free market principles, told the Colorado Times Recorder that he did not believe such a ban would not survive court scrutiny. He referenced the existing statutes used to rule whether a person is mentally unfit to own firearms, which require “a determination by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority.”
“There is no legal basis to ban firearms ownership simply because a person is trans. The categories of ‘prohibited persons’ are created by congressional statutes. The mental prohibitor applies to anyone ‘who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution.’ 18 U.S. Code 922(g)(4).
An ATF regulation defines this as ‘A determination by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority that a person, as a result of marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease: (1) Is a danger to himself or to others; or (2) Lacks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs.’ 27 Code of Fed. Reg. 478.11.
Thus, the statute and the regulation require an ‘adjudicated’ ‘determination.’ Any gun control against trans people who have never been found to be mentally ill by a court of law or similar body would be flagrantly illegal. A gun ban would be a severe violation of the federal statute and of the Second Amendment. A ban would be challenged immediately by pro-gun organizations, and almost certainly held unlawful in the courts.”
The national American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was also contacted for comment on this story, but did not respond before the deadline. This story will be updated with any response received.
Updated 9/23/25 to clarify the Independence Institute’s policy goals.
