The 23-year-old shooter of Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis was born male. He identified as a woman and legally changed his name before he killed two and injured 18.

The shooter of the Nashville Covenant School in March 2023 was born female. She identified as a man and killed six. So was the shooter at a Rite Aid in Maryland, female identifying as male. She killed three and injured three more.

And in our backyard, the 22-year-old who killed five and injured 19 at Club Q in Colorado Springs was born male but declared himself nonbinary.

The 16-year-old shooter at STEM School in Highlands Ranch was female identifying as a boy. She murdered Kendrick Castillo, the hero who died saving his classmates.

Is there a connection between gender dysphoria and mass violence? Maybe, but correlation is not causation.

If you’re a regular reader you know I have no patience for the intolerance of the Shiite transgender movement. Their caliphate demands we publicly deny biological reality, science and chromosomes. We are coerced to use incorrect language on threat of cancellation and, thanks to new legislation, it’s now all punishable by Colorado law. No First Amendment, free speech-loving person should ever tolerate this.

I am told since I won’t call an obvious man a “woman,” I am anti-trans. I’m not. I’m pro-reality and pro-liberty. I don’t care if you think you’re a different gender, or both genders, or a kumquat. I defend your right to do so.

In exchange I expect you to defend my right to identify as I will. I identify as someone who likes proper grammar. I will not say “They is over there.”

You do you. I do me. We call it tolerance and free speech.

The conservative news site DailyWire.com just published this headline, “BREAKING: Trump DOJ (Dept. of Justice) Deliberates Over Gun Ban For Transgenders.” Giving voice to what many are thinking, they report, “Individuals within the DOJ are reviewing ways to ensure mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to obtain firearms while they are unstable and unwell.”

After the Club Q and STEM school shootings would Colorado welcome disarming transgender people? As the argument goes from every gun control advocate, if they couldn’t have guns, those lives might have been saved…

But let’s remember, while trans people have been behind the gun in some shootings, tragically they have been in front of the guns much, much more often. Think of LBGT nightclubs like Club Q and Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida., where 49 people were killed and 53 injured.

It’s not just nightclubs. Cameron Thompson, an 18-year-old trans girl, was fatally shot in Tuscaloosa, Ala., last December. Keshia Chanel Getter, a trans woman shot and killed in Augusta. LBGT activist, Lauri Carleton, was murdered over a Pride flag she displayed in Cedar Glen, California. You get the point.

Like all people, trans people have a constitutional right to protect themselves and those they love. In fact, like minority groups past and present, they may have a greater need to protect themselves.

Disarming minorities is nothing new. The nation’s first gun control laws were created in Southern states to disarm Black citizens after the Civil War. All too often a Black man’s gun was all that stood between him and lynching.

Colorado’s new swell of anti-gun legislation disproportionately hurts people of color, who are poorer and cannot afford the new gun and ammunition taxes. And the new law requiring you pay your sheriff to perhaps give you a permission slip to then pay for a two-day class (meaning you’ll miss two days of work) just to buy an ordinary gun disproportionately effects who exactly?

Political and racial minorities have always been in greatest need of the Second Amendment. The LBGT community may need it now more than ever even though gay marriage is a long-ago settled issue, and celebrating the gay lifestyle is mandatory.

As the L, B and G part of the LGBT coalition refuses to condemn the T’s radical coerced speech mandates and grade-school indoctrination efforts, they all get threatened in the angry backlash.

Gun restrictions targeting any minority group is discrimination plain and simple. Those of us who have been most critical of the trans agenda should be the first to shout our outrage of the singling out of, and the possible disarming of, trans people.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.