CNN anchor embarrasses White House counterterrorism chief over false transgender mass shooter stats
On Sunday, CNN anchor Brianna Keilar challenged White House counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka after he advanced a debunked narrative that transgender people are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings.
The exchange came days after a massacre in Minneapolis, where 23-year-old Robin Westman, who was trans, opened fire during a back-to-school mass at Annunciation Catholic School, killing two children and wounding at least 17 others before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. While investigators probe Westmans motives for the Wednesday shooting, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey warned against scapegoating. Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity. Kids died. This needs to be about them, he said.
Still, on national television, Gorka falsely argued there had been seven transgender shooters in recent years. Keilar pushed back, citing the U.S. Secret Service Threat Assessment Centers review of 172 mass attacks from 2016 to 2020, which found 96 percent of perpetrators were cisgender men. Are you missing the bigger picture here when you zero in on that instead of more broadly these school shooters as an epidemic? she asked.
Gorka rejected the data as pseudo facts and pointed instead to a list he had posted on X, formerly Twitter. It included Audrey Hale, who killed six in Nashville in 2023; Alec McKinney, who in 2019 carried out the STEM School Highlands Ranch attack in Colorado; and Snochia Moseley, who killed three at a Rite Aid warehouse in Maryland in 2018.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/cnn-anchor-embarrasses-white-house-173454487.html
Deport his ass back to Hungary