snip...
The image accumulated hundreds of thousands of engagements across social media in February, following a school shooting in British Columbia, Canada and another shooting arising from an apparent "family dispute" at an ice rink in the US state of Rhode Island. X owner Elon Musk amplified the chart to his more than 234 million followers, writing: "Wow."
The graph has circulated online since at least August 2025, AFP found.
It stems from X user Frank McCormick, who first posted it August 27, 2025 on his "@CBHeresy" account, before adding a variation on February 17, 2026.
Although the post does not explicitly say it is referencing the United States, McCormick later shared his sources, which include the US census and a database of shooting incidents compiled by Mother Jones, an American magazine.
Experts told AFP that despite frequent mass shootings in the United States, the posts framing transgender people as the most likely demographic to commit such acts of violence are mistaken.
"It is plainly obvious that most US shootings are not being done by people who are transgender," said Aaron Chalfin, associate professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania (archived here).
there's no cure for stupid.
I still chuckle at the dozens of people who told me online in 2021 that I would be "dead by Christmas" because I got the COVID vaccine.
Feeling pretty good for a dead man.
For the skeptics on the DR: my wife is a doctor and vividly recalls (and yes, still happening but less often) that in the last four years, she had only ONE COVID patient in the hospital who had gotten the vaccine before admission...and that person was immuno-compromised from a kidney transplant and the anti-rejection drugs that followed. Now think about that, of the roughly 200 patients she has treated for COVID, only one of them had been vaccinated. The vaccine did not keep everyone from getting COVID< but it was very very effective at keeping the vaccinated from getting serious cases