We Asked the NRA if It Supports Trans Americans’ Gun Rights

The National Rifle Association holds the Second Amendment to be self-evident. There is no room for debate on gun control. For decades, it has fought against almost every form of it on the local, state, and national levels. 

You can blame (or thank) the NRA for the assault weapons ban expiring in 2004 and for defeating a bill that would have required background checks for gun show and private sales in the mid-2010s. Right now, it’s suing deep red Florida over the state’s waiting period for firearms sales. 

Nothing can break its resolve. Through every mass shooting, every child splayed and bloody on a classroom floor, and each round of prayers and national reckoning in this country, it has held the line. The Second Amendment is the check on tyranny, the right our country’s founding and survival relied on. Its solution to gun violence? More guns. In the hands of the “good guys” so the “bad guys” don’t win.

Today, news broke that senior officials in the Department of Justice are having preliminary discussions to limit transgender Americans’ Second Amendment rights because a person who identified as transgender at one time shot up a Catholic school in Minneapolis last week, killing two kids and injuring 21 people. That person’s worship of mass shooters suggests that extremism, not identity, motivated the violence. But that doesn’t serve the administration’s narrative of the dangerous trans person.

The dangerous trans person invading bathrooms to prey on children. The dangerous trans person getting off on stripping down in the women’s locker room. The dangerous trans person destroying their body and, like a perverted pied piper, recruiting children to follow them. The dangerous trans person too mentally ill to be trusted with a gun.

There’s no point getting into statistics about how trans people are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. If identity were the reason for every mass shooting, white men would have lost their guns years ago. 

It doesn’t seem the Department of Justice even has the authority to do this. But we’re not dealing in truth, or the law. We’re dealing in ideology. And in the tyranny the NRA says it has stood against these many decades. What’s the phrase? I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands?

So, is the NRA ready to stand by its unflappable American values and wave the pink, white, and blue in one hand and a Gadsden flag in the other until Trump takes them both from its cold, dead hands? Or is this just like 1967, when the NRA defended California’s Mulford Act to disarm the Black Panthers in Oakland? 

I’d like to tell you, but the NRA didn’t return my email.