CNN analyst on Nashville shooting: 'Pronouns do not kill children, people with guns kill children'

CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem pushed back against critics of transgender people following Monday's school shooting in Nashville.

During a Tuesday panel discussion on CNN, host Don Lemon noted that it was unusual to have the shooter, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, identify as a transgender person.

"The police are identifying the shooter as a trans woman, would actually be a trans man," Lemon explained. "So there's sort of a misidentification there, but this is all new."

"I'm just wondering, the identity of being a transgender person and also being identified as a woman, does this pose any sort of difference or difficulty for police?" the CNN host asked. "Because it's not typically a woman, regardless of how they're identifying."

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Kayyem acknowledged that the case was unique.

"And so that uniqueness is obviously gonna go to only one part of this, right?" she observed. "Each of these school shootings has motive and means."

"That's when you start to see these are all starting to look the same, right?" Kayyem continued. "I sort of think now like we don't own guns in this country; guns own us at this stage."

The analyst pointed out that school shooters preferred a "certain kind of gun."

"Look, pronouns do not kill children," she remarked. "People with guns kill children. And it's going to be a distraction in our coverage and keep us from what we now know, which is each of these cases has a similarity more than any difference."

In the hours after the shooting in Nashville on Monday, conservatives like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) rushed to suggest that the shooter's gender identity was to blame.

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