Pink Pistols: LGBT Gun Owners Unite in Arming Gay Community

[TeddyR]

This, of course, is a large part of the Pink Pistol's mission: to get LGBT people more comfortable with firearms and encourage them to fight hate crimes with bullets – or at least the threat of them. A small, loosely organized group of a few dozen chapters scattered across the states and Canada, including Toronto, San Francisco and Charleston, South Carolina, the Pink Pistols' membership has climbed from around 1,500 earlier this month to about 6,500 since the June day Omar Mateen attacked the Pulse nightclub, turning the dance floor into a killing field and crashing together two culture war battlegrounds that rarely converge: gays and guns. While the majority of LGBT people seem to be calling for more regulation, Pink Pistols and their allies are hunkering down and taking up arms, banding together under the group's motto, a confrontational warning to potential gay-bashers: "Pick on someone your own caliber."

The Pink Pistols formed around 2000, after gay journalist Jonathan Rauch – still outraged by Matthew Shepard's 1998 murder, and knowing gay men who stopped attacks with guns – published an article on Salon. "[Gays] should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry," he wrote, noting that they should do it in a way to garner as much publicity as possible. And, as an added bonus to self-protection, Pink Pistols could erode tenacious stereotypes, challenging the image of cringing weakness, especially for those who internalized it. "Pink pistols," he wrote, "would do far more for the self-esteem of the next generation of gay men and women than any number of hate-crime laws or anti-discrimination statutes."

This is from a rather lengthy article at Rolling Stone - http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/pink-pistols-lgbt-gun-owners-unite-in-arming-gay-community-20160628#ixzz4Czvgtm3h