In the remote mountain town of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, a teenager opened fire at a residence and a secondary school, killing nine people and then taking his own life. Family members have confirmed that 17-year-old Jesse Strang identified as transgender. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, in a display of ideological capture that would be farcical if it weren’t so tragic, initially described the shooter as “female in a dress with brown hair” and later referred to the killer as a “gunperson.”
Within hours, the familiar drumbeat began. Ban guns. Restrict firearms for certain groups. Target the transgender community with pre-crime measures. Some of these calls will come from the conservative side of the aisle. They must be resisted.
Canada has its own restrictive gun laws and tightens them when it experiences gun violence, but here in America, the text of the Second Amendment is not ambiguous. “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It does not say “the right of some people.” It does not include an asterisk for the mentally troubled, the politically inconvenient, or the culturally unpopular. It is a universal guarantee and it applies to every law-abiding American, including those who identify as transgender.
If we are serious about reducing mass shootings, we need to stop chasing the weapon and start confronting the sickness. And the sickness isn’t much different from the root cause behind the broader epidemic of mass violence this century: psychiatric mind-bending drugs and a medical establishment that has abandoned its oath to “first, do no harm.”
Robin Westman, the trans-identified man who undertook a Catholic school massacre in Minneapolis in August, left behind a manifesto that should haunt every gender-affirming physician in America. “I am tired of being trans. I wish I never brainwashed myself,” Westman wrote. In another passage: “Gender and weed f*cked up my head. I wish I never tried experimenting with either. Don’t let your kids smoke weed or change gender until they are like seventeen.” Early reports indicate that Strang was also taking SSRIs.
Westman's words are not the testimony of someone who found healing through gender affirmation. This is the anguished confession of a person who was led down a path of irreversible psychological and chemical manipulation and who, in his final moments of pain-filled clarity, recognized it for what it was.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has directed the National Institutes of Health to study the potential connection between SSRI antidepressants, psychiatric medications and violent behavior, noting that many carry black box warnings for suicidal and homicidal ideation. This is the right line of inquiry. We need to understand what these drugs do to developing brains, particularly when combined with the radical hormonal disruption of cross-sex hormones.
The Left helped create a societal turbo-cancer by promoting gender affirmation as standard medical practice. Think about the absurdity of this position for a moment. We don’t affirm other delusions. If a patient with anorexia says she weighs three hundred pounds, we don’t hand her diet pills. If a schizophrenic patient presents with multiple personalities, we don’t issue each personality its own driver’s license. We treat the underlying condition. We work toward healing.
Transgender Americans have the right to bear arms. Full stop. That right is not negotiable and defending it is not a concession, it is a constitutional imperative.
But Americans also have the responsibility, indeed, the moral obligation to stop the medical and psychological professions from engaging in gross malpractice. We must ban physicians from prescribing drugs and performing procedures that cement delusions in their patients’ minds and permanently mutilate children’s bodies. We must treat mental illness with the goal of curing it, not affirming it.
The path forward is clear:
First, ban all gender-transition procedures and cross-sex hormone prescriptions for minors nationwide. Children cannot consent to permanent bodily alteration. Period.
Second, fund rigorous, independent research into the psychiatric effects of SSRIs, cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers, research not funded by the pharmaceutical companies that profit from these prescriptions.
Third, restore the medical profession’s commitment to evidence-based treatment of gender dysphoria rather than ideological affirmation. The European medical establishment, including the UK’s Cass Review, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, has already begun pulling back from the American model of reflexive affirmation. We should follow their lead.
Fourth, critically, reject any and all proposals to restrict the Second Amendment rights of transgender Americans or any other class of citizens based on group identity. Due process means individual adjudication, not categorical disarmament.
Behind each of these tragedies stands a broken individual who was failed by a system more interested in ideology than healing. The answer is not to tear pages from the Constitution. The answer is to tear the prescription pads from the hands of doctors who have confused affirmation with treatment, ideology with medicine, and revenue with care.
Don’t infringe on gun rights. Ban the fringe transgender drugs and procedures that are destroying minds and ending lives.
Larry Ward is Chairman of the Constitutional Rights PAC and President of Political Media, Inc.
