After decades of political inaction after mass shootings, the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting appears to finally have spurred conservatives into action. That’s because this horrific slaying was the grotesque gift the right had been waiting for: The shooter – whose diary entries show a troubled young person immersed in extremist, racist online culture – happened to also be trans.

The Department of Justice is now considering options to ban trans people from owning guns, with senior department officials reportedly dedicating numerous meetings to determining precisely how to strip constitutional rights from an entire category of Americans.

The effort is as cynical as it is transparent: in response to one incident of mass violence linked to a trans perpetrator, the government will further vilify trans people as an a priori public threat, while finding new ways to exclude trans people from the class of rights-bearing individuals.

Anti-trans zealots have for some time attempted to conjure a link between violent crime and trans people. These efforts, however, tend to fizzle because mass shootings in the U.S. are overwhelmingly a cis problem. Across 5,700 mass shootings in the U.S. since 2013, only five shooters have been trans. The vast majority shootings are carried out by cis men; the vast majority of politically motivated attacks are carried out by far-right extremists. Yet the Trump administration is scaling back law enforcement efforts focused on the very real problem of white supremacist extremism to pour resources into

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