Candace Owens Goes Viral After Nashville Shooting Comments

Conservative author and talk-show host Candace Owens has gone viral for comments she made after the deadly shooting in Nashville by Audrey Hale, who had identified as transgender.

Owens took to Twitter hours after the 28-year-old killed three adults and three children at Nashville's Covenant School on Monday morning in Tennessee. Police confirmed that officers shot Hale dead at the scene.

The children killed in the shooting were identified as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney—all 9 years old. The adult victims were Cynthia Peak, Mike Hill, both 61, and Katherine Koonce, 60, listed as head of school on the Covenant website.

The Nashville shooting was the 129th mass shooting in the U.S. in 2023, with 37 having been committed in March, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA). While there is no agreed definition, the GVA says a mass shooting is four or more people shot or killed in an incident, excluding the shooter. Firearms shooting is the leading cause of death for U.S. children.

Police told media that Hale was transgender and had been assigned female at birth. Hale identified as male, according to social-media posts where the shooter used he/him pronouns.

"When you play Frankenstein with people's body's parts, you can't be surprised when they behave like monsters," tweeted Owens. "A person willing to execute violence upon his/her own body will not hesitate to impart violence onto someone else's."

Owens did not mention the shooter in her tweet. In a later tweet, she questioned whether Hale was receiving drugs of some kind.

Newsweek could not confirm whether Hale had undergone gender-affirming surgery—procedures to align the body with the person's gender—or had started hormone replacement therapy, which in this case would mean taking testosterone. Some transgender people undergo what is known as 'social transition.' This is when they present as the gender they identify with before beginning treatment, according to medical center Fenway Health.

In a comment emailed to Newsweek, Owens said: "I have been consistent in my commentary for years, about the dangers of further fostering the delusions that individuals with gender dysphoria suffer from. These individuals need psychological care, not cultural lies and pharmaceutical drugs that send them further into their delusions.

"It will never be an act of love to hand drugs to individuals that suffer from mental illness that will only lead to their chemical castration. This is not about Audrey— this is about the cancerous lie of transgenderism as a whole and crimes that can be avoided if we as a society develop the courage to call out mental derangement and those that promote it unabashedly," she said.

GLAAD, which describes itself as the world's largest Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) media advocacy organization, said what happened in Nashville should be seen as part of an epidemic of mass shootings.

"While families and communities are mourning, extremists are lying about the trans community and gun violence to distract from the brutal truth: more children are dying from gun violence than any other cause of death in America," the group tweeted.

Defenders of LGBTQ+ rights accuse some conservatives of seeking to marginalize and harm transgender people and to deprive them of their rights by characterizing them as ill as well as by using slurs against them.

Another conservative commentator, Benny Johnson, also wrote that Hale's transgender identity was the reason the shooter undertook the attack.

Johnson tweeted: "The Colorado Springs shooter identified as non binary. The Denver shooter identified as trans. The Aberdeen shooter identified as trans. The Nashville shooter identified as trans. One thing is VERY clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists."

While the assailants from the mass shootings Johnson referenced, which occurred between 2018 and 2023, were reported to identify as non-binary or transgender, the vast majority of mass shootings are still perpetrated by cisgendered men. This term refers to someone who identifies with the male gender they were assigned at birth.

Nonprofit think tank The Violence Project found 98 percent of mass shootings were committed by cisgendered men. Of the 191 mass shooters in its database, four were women, and two of those were partnered with a male shooter at the time of committing the crime.

According to the Williams Institute research center, around 0.6 percent of Americans over the age of 13 identify as transgender.

Owens had also earlier tweeted: "Transgenderism is a mental illness. Keep your children away from transgendered individuals and their parents.

"People that support and encourage this are monsters and should similarly be kept away from children."

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed being transgender as a mental health issue from its list of mental disorders in 2012. The World Health Organization (WHO) followed suit in 2019, because it realized being transgender was "not actually a mental health condition."

"It was taken out from mental-health disorders because we had a better understanding that this was not actually a mental-health condition, and leaving it there was causing stigma," said WHO health expert Dr. Lale Say in 2019.

The APA instead replaced transgender as a disorder with gender dysphoria as it more accurately covers the mental-health challenges transgender people face. It refers to the "psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one's sex assigned at birth and one's gender identity."

Research has also found that transgender people face higher rates of mental-health issues such as depression, anxiety and suicidal ideations than cisgendered people. This is not because they are transgender but because of societal stigma, discrimination and abuse as a result of their gender identity.

Nashville Police Chief John Drake spoke of speculation about Hale's gender identity during a media conference on Monday evening. Drake said the shooting as a "targeted attack" and added that police had found a detailed manifesto and map of the shooting.

Drake also answered the question of whether police believed Hale's identity had something to do with the shooting.

"We can give you that at a later time. There is some theory to that. We're investigating all the leads," Drake said. He added that officers are reviewing the manifesto and map related to the incident. They were continuing to investigate the motive behind the attack.

Newsweek has emailed The Violence Project for comment.

Correction 03/28/23, 4:17 p.m. ET: This article corrected the inaccurate headline stating that Owens had said transgender surgery made the Nashville shooter into a monster

Update 03/28/23, 4:40 p.m. ET: Updates with comment from GLAAD

Update 03/28/23, 6:18 p.m. ET: Updates with comment from Owens.