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Republicans Are Coming for Your Guns [1]
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Date: 2025-09-04
In news that I haven’t even seen mentioned anywhere else as of beginning this diary, CNN is reporting that the DOJ is looking for ways to ban all transgender Americans from being able to own or purchase firearms on the grounds that the Administration believes we are all mentally defective. After decades of Republicans screaming from the rooftops to anyone who would listen that Democrats were going to try to take your guns it turns out that, as always, every accusation is a confession. Conveniently the noise coming from the 2nd Amendments absolutists is that of crickets.
This is being done, I assume, ostensibly in the name of preventing transgender people from committing any more mass shootings after the tragedy of the attack on Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis last week on August 27th. In reality the only real reason they are attempting to do this is the same reason that any authoritarian regime has had for disarming any segment of its population: to make it easier to target them for mass incarceration without adding risk to the lives of their jackbooted foot soldiers.
The Administration also conveniently chooses to ignore the fact that since 1982 out of the 155 mass shootings in America 149 were committed by men alone with two more being committed by at least one man and one woman together. They also ignore the fact that 84 of those men were white. Nor do they care to take in to account that, with rare exceptions, politically or ideologically motivated shootings have by and large committed by those with right or far-right beliefs as frequently espoused by their choice of targets revealed by interviews with the shooter(s), their friends and families, manifestos stating as such, or a combination of all three.
All told transgender people have committed 1% or less of all mass shootings in the United States going back to Charles Whitman and the University of Texas Clocktower shooting, widely considered to be the “first” mass shooting in American history though others in American history likely would also fit the bill. White, conservative/far-right men in America are far more prolific in their likelihood to commit these heinous acts, but the Administration isn’t trying to collectively disarm that segment of the population en masse.
No, this is yet another attack by the Administration on one of the most marginalized population subsets in America. It is meant to further ostracize transgender people by setting us apart as different, as “the other” that must always exist in an authoritarian or fascist society. The next logical step, if we look at the history of these regimes in the 20th and 21st centuries, will be one of two outcomes desirable to those attempting to implement this rule.
First is the option likely to be more palatable to a wider swathe of the population: to go one step further from labeling transgender people “mentally defective” to labeling us as “mentally incompetent” which would allow the government to institutionalize us. Too many people, most of whom don’t know anyone transgender, would see this as a logical continuation on the mental illness spectrum and doing so would be for “our own good”. However, as a former medical professional I can attest to just how difficult it is to get a court to agree with physicians that a person is so far gone from reality that institutionalization, even for a short amount of time, is in the best interest of both the individual and society writ large. Doing so to the estimated three million transgender people in America would all but break the court system.
Barring that happening the second most likely method is to, essentially, declare transgender people criminals for the sheer audacity of being transgender. This would allow the government to incarcerate transgender people without those pesky courts getting involved with things like individual rights and liberties.
Don’t believe me? It’s in Project 2025, MAGA’s personal playbook, right there on Pages 36 and 37. It equates what it calls “radical gender ideology” with pornography and demands that all pornography be outlawed along with those who expose children to it to be deemed sex offenders such as educators and librarians. Do you genuinely think they’ll arrest and slap such a stigma on teachers and librarians while letting those of us who are transgender off scot free?
The Administration is finally taking active steps to do what those of us in the transgender community have been saying they would for months upon months: they are working to remove our Constitutionally guaranteed rights on the path toward erasing us from American society. All the while people have been telling us that we were crazy and that it would never happen. We’ve been gaslit constantly when we say that our very existence is at threat.
Are you beginning to understand and believe, or are you going to continue to deny what your lying eyes are telling you?
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