The Trump administration is reportedly considering an effort to ban transgender people from owning guns despite the Second Amendment protection of the right to bear arms.

After the recent Minneapolis Catholic school shooting that was blamed on a trans woman, Department of Justice officials are considering legal options to declare transgender people as mentally ill and therefore unfit to carry firearms, CNN reported on Thursday.

The report, which called the discussions preliminary, said one option would be to use President Donald Trump’s order barring trans people from serving in the military as a template for gun restrictions.

The goal would be “to ensure that mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to obtain firearms while they are unstable and unwell,” a Justice Department official told CNN, using a favored right-wing term for trans people.

Even Trump officials admit that any such proposal would face serious legal hurdles, presumably not least from right-wing proponents of the Second Amendments who traditionally fiercely oppose even narrow efforts to restrict gun ownership.

Current law says gun rights can only be revoked from a person who is declared “mentally defective,” a very high legal bar that could not support a blanket ban applied to any large group of Americans.

Many Republican lawmakers and most gun rights groups have long opposed policies known as red flag laws and other measures aimed at keeping guns away from people suffering from mental health issues, citing fears they could eventually be broadened or improperly applied.

Trump has dramatically rolled back trans rights during his second term including the military ban and an order instructing federal prisons to move transgender inmates to facilities corresponding to the gender they were assigned at birth.

Red states have pushed for new laws to ban gender-affirming care for minors.

The GOP-led Congress has taken steps to bar transgender women from using women’s bathrooms at the Capitol after the 2024 election of Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Delaware, as the first openly transgender lawmaker in history.

Although trans people comprise a tiny minority of mass shooters, right-wing figures have recently claimed that they are responsible for a disproportionate number of the attacks, including the Minneapolis bloodshed in which two children were killed and many others wounded, along with an attack at a Christian school in Nashville last year.

Donald Trump Jr. posted an unconfirmed list of shootings that he blamed on transgender shooters to push back on statistics showing that the majority of American mass shootings are carried out by disaffected young white men.

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