Justice Department officials have urged people not to jump to conclusions after The Wall Street Journal published a report on Thursday about the bullets used in the shooting death of Charlie Kirk.
The Journal was told by a law enforcement source that bullets recovered at the scene were engraved with “transgender and antifascist ideology,” but no further details were provided, and no evidence was forthcoming.
The newspaper later followed that report with another stating that some officials are cautioning people against making any conclusions based on that initial report.
The initial bulletin said that a hunting rifle had been discovered in the woods near the Utah Valley University campus, along with a spent cartridge still in the chamber and three unspent rounds in the magazine, “all with wording on them.”
Now, The Journal is reporting that Justice Department officials have stressed that the probe is still in its early stages and investigators are still analyzing the evidence. As a result, the initial bulletin “may not accurately reflect the messages on the ammunition.”
A report from The New York Times quoted a senior law enforcement official who cautioned that the preliminary report had not been verified by analysts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and did not match other summaries of the evidence.
Unsubstantiated initial reports of the shooter’s potential gender identity or pro-trans ideology were enough for many in the MAGAsphere to begin demonizing trans people.
President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., said during a Thursday appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show, “I can’t name, including probably like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, a group that is more violent per capita than the radical trans movement.”
“It feels like they’ve done every mass shooting in America for the last few years, but we’re not allowed to talk about it,” Trump added.
Based on a study of 4,147 mass shootings carried out since 2018, PolitiFact found that seven were perpetrated by transgender people, at a rate of 0.17 percent.
MAGA has fixated on trans people as a source of gun violence in the U.S. in recent weeks as a result of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis. The shooter in that incident, who died by suicide at the scene, had legally changed their name from Robert to Robin.
Earlier this month, a report from CNN revealed that senior officials in the Justice Department were contemplating introducing a weapons ban singling out transgender Americans, limiting their ability to possess firearms in spite of the Second Amendment and repeated refusals on the part of Republican lawmakers to implement gun control measures in response to repeated mass shootings.
It was this hot-button issue that Kirk was being questioned about when he was killed at Utah Valley University campus.
The student who asked Kirk the question took to social media to speak about what he witnessed, describing it as a “rough 24 hours” and Kirk’s death a “tragedy.”
Hunter Kozak, a mathematics student at Utah Valley University, had previously uploaded a video to TikTok debunking Kirk’s claims about there being a “trend” of transgender mass shooters in recent months.
Finding just five transgender mass shooters among the 5,469 mass shootings he examined, Kozak concluded that “trans people are surprisingly and extremely non-violent.”
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