The clerk smiles. Rachel has done this before. It was her idea to meet at XCAL, a recreation center in Ashburn. A large, blocky building with megachurch aesthetics that’s indistinguishable from the government-contracting offices lining the highways nearby, XCAL offers a world-class gym and a range of classes including HIIT, martial arts, and barre. But downstairs, there’s something you won’t find at most other fitness facilities: three extremely fancy gun ranges.
One offers targets that can rotate 360 degrees. A “luxury range” has wide stalls perfect for groups. Spend a bit more money and you can rent a private range where you don’t have to worry about some bonehead with a shotgun disturbing your concentration. There’s also—sure, why not?—a nice cafe.
We watch a short safety video before approaching the rental counter. Rachel—who asked that Washingtonian not use her real name—looks at my gear, a Ruger 10/22 long rifle and cheap ear protectors. She accurately sizes me up: not exactly in the same league as her, gun-wise. Rachel brought a Glock 19 pistol, a heavily modified AR-pattern rifle, and hearing protectors with built-in microphones that will allow us to speak casually as our fellow firearms enthusiasts fill the air with tiny explosions. To rescue my reputation, I rent a Staccato P, a high-end nine-millimeter pistol with a $2,500 list price, as well as a couple hundred rounds of ammunition. Just for fun, we pick up some targets with colorful balloons.
I rarely discuss guns with others in Washington, where, let’s face it, being a gun owner is not always a popular hobby. But I’ve been shooting since I was a kid. For a long time, I had little interest in owning firearms or keeping up my skills. Two things changed in the past few years. My dad died and left me several of his rifles. Meanwhile, my 19-year-old son became an excellent target shooter, and going to the range is one of the few fun things he’ll still do with me. Even so, my feelings about guns are at best ambivalent. In DC, gunfire accounted for more than 90 percent of a record number of killings in 2023. More than half of all suicides in the US involve guns, and states with the fewest gun laws have significantly more suicides involving firearms than those with the most restrictions. Personally, I am entirely content just using guns to make holes in pieces of paper.
Rachel’s life is very, very different from mine. She was born in this century and grew up anti-gun as a child. She spent those years in Arlington, one of the most politically blue communities in the US—a jurisdiction where lawmakers and county residents organized protests against its only standalone gun shop when it opened in 2016. In 2021, Rachel came out to her parents as trans. The next year, she picked up a gun for the first time.
Some of Rachel’s interest stemmed from her growing embrace of far-left politics, as she decided “it’s kind of difficult to believe capitalism should be fought by any means necessary and also be against guns.” More important, she felt a threatening change in the cultural climate around trans people. Online talk got toxic. A trans friend was “swatted”—a method of harassment in which people call in false police reports to terrify their online enemies. That November, a man carrying an AR-15-style rifle entered Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, and killed five people, injuring many others. “I was probably a bit too online at that point,” Rachel says. “But the violence is also real.”
A friend brought Rachel to the Silver Eagle Group range in Ashburn and sold her a subcompact Ruger LCP pistol, which she hated—it was too puny, and the trigger felt wrong—but nevertheless learned to shoot with. She attended range days in Southern Maryland with a group called the Socialist Rifle Association, whose motto is “We Keep Us Safe.” Soon, thanks to the pretty good living she was making as a programmer, she bought the AR and the Glock, then learned how to modify her rifle by watching videos.
Rachel met her partner, Lilah, at a protest after reports that the Supreme Court planned to overturn Roe v. Wade. For Lilah, the looming SCOTUS decision was part of “a rising tide of fascism in this country” that peaked on January 6. With Rachel’s encouragement, Lilah, who had learned to shoot as a youngster but subsequently lost interest, picked up guns again. “All the people who want to kill the people I care about have guns,” Rachel says. “So I do, too.”
Gun Culture 2.0
Reasonable and unreasonable people alike disagree on what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote the Second Amendment, but there’s little doubt about the increasingly expansive way courts have interpreted the right to bear arms. It’s not so surprising that in recent years—a time defined by a disruptive and divisive pandemic, wrenching reckonings over race and sexual abuse, extreme political polarization and violence, a national homicide surge in 2020 and 2021, and a rinse-repeat cycle of mass shootings—gun ownership is rising.
In 2020, Americans bought a record number of guns. According to a firearms-industry trade group, 21 million background checks were conducted for the sale of a firearm—a 60-percent rise over the previous year—and four out of ten of those gun buyers had never owned one before. Last year, more than half of registered voters in an NBC News poll said they live in a household where someone owns a gun.
Historically, gun ownership has been concentrated among white men, particularly conservative men in rural areas. But that’s changing. Four years ago, NBC News found, about 24 percent of Black households owned guns. Now it’s 41 percent. The same percentage of Democratic households now own guns, up from 33 percent in 2004. David Yamane, a Wake Forest sociology professor, uses the term “Gun Culture 2.0” to describe this shift. His research shows that new gun owners are “more female, more racial minority, more urban.” There’s little specific data about how many in this cohort are LGBTQ+, Yamane says, but he wouldn’t be surprised if gun ownership among people like Rachel is becoming more common.
Broadly speaking, liberal and progressive politicians remain committed to gun control. Meanwhile, ordinary Americans in the demographic categories most likely to support those politicians are increasingly arming themselves. I went shooting with Rachel because I wanted to understand why. Yamane himself offers a hint. He grew up in the Bay Area, he says, and was 42 before he ever saw a gun in real life. After a scary incident with a neighbor in North Carolina, he began to look at firearms differently. Now he’s a gun owner, too.
Yamane is Japanese American, and Asian Americans are among the most prominent groups recently to take up more guns. This probably isn’t coincidental. Following the start of the pandemic, anti-Asian hate crimes experienced what a federal report called a “historic surge.” And according to FBI hate-crime data—which for various reasons almost certainly undercounts actual incidents across the country—attacks targeting people for their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion have been rising for years. People on the left have long had reasons to be fearful, Yamane says, but “what maybe is new is people saying, ‘Hey, how do I defend myself against this? Maybe I should get a firearm.’ ”
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Hard Targets
Rachel comes across as a fairly typical member of Generation Z. She’s comfortable with diversity, freely discusses her mental health, and doesn’t always draw a hard line between online life and what older folks like me quaintly think of as the “real world.” On the day we met, she spent her morning driving her Prius around rural parts of Loudoun and Fairfax counties, visiting farm stands to buy vegetables for a vegan celebration of the fall equinox she and some fellow pagans had planned.
In all our conversations, however, Rachel told me about feeling unsafe or worrying about the safety of people around her. America has never been especially friendly toward LGBTQ+ people, and in recent years their growing cultural visibility and acceptance has sparked a backlash. Radical right-wing groups have harassed drag events, while some Republican politicians and self-proclaimed parents’-rights organizations have portrayed school lessons and library books about sexual orientation and gender identity as pedophilic tools for “grooming” children.
Meanwhile, governments in red and purple states have legislated specifically against trans people ages 13 to 17, who according to recent reports number about 300,000. Twenty-three states ban transgender kids from taking part in sports that align with their gender identities, 22 forbid gender-affirming healthcare, and nine ban people from using restrooms that don’t align with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Violence looms as well. A 2021 report from UCLA’s law school found that trans people are more than four times as likely as cisgender people to be victims of violent crime. One in four trans people polled by the health-policy research nonprofit KFF and the Washington Post said they’ve been physically attacked because of their identity. The FBI’s tally of hate crimes based on gender identity jumped 32 percent from 2021 to 2022—and again, the actual number is likely higher.
Rachel often feels scared to go out at night. “For a lot of us, it feels like we’re living in the years before something really bad happening,” she says. About a year after she came out, she says, she and her mom were arguing about gun ownership. (Mom is not a fan.) Her mother told her fear was just part of what “being a woman is. It is scary.” But Rachel doesn’t want to live that way. Guns, she says, offer a solution.
“I am a relatively small person,” Rachel says. “I can throw a very good punch, but with guns, you don’t need to worry about if the person you’re fighting is on drugs or is hopped up on adrenaline and can’t feel pain that much. They’re the great force equalizer.”
Rachel is hardly the first person on the left to take up arms. In the 1960s, the Black Panthers patrolled the streets of Oakland with guns to protect Black residents from police brutality. For a short period in the mid-1970s, a San Francisco group called the Lavender Panthers brandished sawed-off pool cues—and at least one .410 shotgun—while defending queer people from gay-bashers. Inspired by an incident in which a gay teenager in Arkansas was saved from a group of gay-bashers when his pistol-packing companion fired a warning shot over their heads, journalist Jonathan Rauch in 2000 called for gay people to “embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them.” That inspired the creation of the gay gun group Pink Pistols, whose motto is “Pick On Someone Your Own Caliber.”
Erin Palette, a trans lesbian from Florida, says she spent most of her younger years hearing that gun owners were “right-wing conservative males who hate queer people and want them dead.” But after the 2016 mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Palette—who became a gun owner in 2010 and was already a member of Pink Pistols—began to collect names of queer-friendly firearms instructors, under the name Operation Blazing Sword. The organization now has a directory of more than 1,500 volunteer educators—and in 2018 merged with Pink Pistols, where Palette is now the organization’s national coordinator. In that role, she has become a prominent Second Amendment advocate.
Palette doesn’t know exactly how many people are currently part of Pink Pistols. The group was formed, she says, “when you could still lose your job and face social ostracism for being outed as gay or any other form of queer. So the idea was, if no official paperwork exists, it can’t be subpoenaed.” However, she says there are currently 25 active chapters around the country and interest in the organization from people who want to shoot has grown since the Pulse shooting.
Palette says some conservatives have cheered that growth. After the Pulse shooting, she saw what she calls an “outpouring of love” from those on the right, including offers to accompany queer people on educational forays to ranges. But, ironically, while conservative supporters of gun rights have long argued that an armed populace is an essential defense against state tyranny, some LGBTQ+ people are now coming to the same conclusion about conservative government. After news leaked in the spring of 2022 that the Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe, whistleblower and trans woman Chelsea Manning posted on social media that “you should consider arming yourselves, then finding others to train with in teams and learn how to defend your community—we may need these skills in the very near future.”
For Palette, gun rights are LGBTQ+ rights, allowing queer people to defend themselves in a terrifying world. “Our continued success and our continued growth,” she says of Operation Blazing Sword and Pink Pistols, “points to the fact that, yeah, we are in danger.”
Culture Clash
While Gun Culture 2.0 has a fair amount in common with its conservative antecedent—both, at their core, are about feeling safe—the two tend not to mix. Consider Clara Elliott. She grew up in the Richmond area shooting alongside her dad, learning to fire flintlock rifles alongside modern firearms. Today, she splits her time between Virginia and Connecticut, where she has a business that teaches people to shoot.
In October 2020, Elliott took a course to teach others to become NRA-certified firearms instructors near Lynchburg, Virginia, where, she says, the instructor made jokes about Blacks, Muslims, and women. At a gun shop near Richmond that same year, she experienced more of the same. “There were Blacks, there were soccer moms, there were people of color, there were all these different groups in there,” she says. Some of the customers bristled at the new crowd. “Two guys were standing behind me in line, and they were talking about the blue-hair Antifa people trying to ruin our country.”
At the time, Elliott had blue hair. People who come to her for instruction, she says, expect “some guy standing in front of the classroom with, like, a tactical vest. That’s absolutely not me. I’m a trans woman.” Indeed, Elliott’s business is named ATW Firearms Instruction; the initials stand for Armed Trans Women. She mostly teaches LGBTQ+ people, but also people of color and Muslims—groups, she says, who are often uncomfortable in traditional, conservative gun spaces.
Yamane says this discomfort is common among newer gun owners, including him. “I don’t want to see a ‘Trump 2024’ flag hanging at the top of the front door of any gun space,” he says. “It’s 100 percent true that when I hear the kind of culture-warrior arguments coming out of the gun community that tie gun ownership to all of those other things—you know, hordes are coming over the border and welfare cheats and, you know, dangerous Black people taking over cities—that stuff just makes me kind of repelled from identification as a gun owner.”
Into this breach, left-wing gun owners have created their own groups, with names such as the Liberal Gun Club and the John Brown Gun Club. Many participants, Palette says, are simply looking for instruction that doesn’t make them feel like second-class citizens. Shooting with the Socialist Rifle Association, Rachel says, “was the first time that I’ve ever felt truly comfortable at a range. Because it was mostly other queer people.” In her courses, Elliott teaches the importance of first aid and deescalation techniques alongside firearms knowledge. Class fees are on a sliding scale, and she sends free self-defense kits to trans and nonbinary people. The kits include a stun gun, pepper spray, and box cutters—but also condoms and lip balm, because, Elliott says, “protecting yourself is more than just being able to be armed.” She’s written a zine about gun safety, which she sells in ATW’s online shop alongside stickers that say “Trantifa” and mugs that read “This Queer Shoots Back.”
For Charlotte Clymer, though, there’s nothing cute about gun ownership. The writer and LGBTQ+ activist is a trans woman who’s also an Army veteran. “I think it is completely rational for a trans person to decide to purchase a firearm for self-defense,” she says—provided that such a person trains to be a responsible gun owner. What worries her is what she describes as an online trend of trans people posting photos of themselves holding guns and acting like there’s something funny about gearing up: “I really do think a lot of trans people are gravitating towards this idea that doing an ironic show of force will be helpful for their own safety and for the safety of the community at large. All that does is provoke a sense of distrust and anger in people who are already anti-trans.”
At any rate, the percentage of LGBTQ+ people who actually own guns is probably relatively small. A 2018 UCLA law school survey found that while 35 percent of straight adults have a gun at home, only 19 percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults do. Similarly, LGBTQ+ people are more likely than straight people to support stronger gun-control laws. “Anybody who’s a left-leaning gun owner does find themselves politically and culturally homeless,” Yamane says.
Chris Cheng can relate. A gay man who won the History Channel’s Top Shot competition in 2012 and then quit his job at Google to become an advocate for shooting sports and gun rights, Cheng says many gay people are “stuck in the gun closet,” wary of the social and even career effects of coming out as gun owners: “The gay community is so intolerant of views that do not line up with your traditional kind of liberal Democrat.”
Anybody who’s a left-leaning gun owner does find themselves politically and culturally homeless
In some ways, Cheng has managed to bridge the political gap between gun cultures. He’s worked as a commentator on NRA News but also testified before Congress about how racism has manifested through gun control. (In many Southern states after Reconstruction, gun laws were enacted with the express purpose of preventing Blacks from owning firearms, and Native Americans still can’t use a tribal ID to buy a gun.) His book, Shoot to Win: Tips, Tactics, and Techniques to Help You Shoot Like a Pro, features a complimentary blurb from right-wing firebrand Dana Loesch. “I often say that the gun community is way more diverse than the gay community,” Cheng says.
Still, conservative acceptance of gun culture’s changing face is not exactly the norm. When, in June 2021, the gun magazine Recoil shared a cover on Instagram depicting Cheng posing with a rifle in a rainbow-flag T-shirt, commenters flipped out about “cultural Marxism” and the “promotion” of homosexuality. Despite the fact that 96 percent of mass shootings are committed by straight, cisgender males, some right-wing voices have seized on the fact that a handful of shooters may have identified as trans to call for restrictions on the ability of all trans people to own guns.
Last March, then–Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson reacted with dismissive skepticism to an NPR story about Rainbow Reload, a queer gun group formed to defend members from hate attacks. After first acknowledging that he supported “American citizens carrying firearms,” Carlson told his audience that the group was not exercising the Second Amendment but rather engaging in “political hysteria.” Asking, “What’s the limit to this?,” Carlson imagined a scenario in which trans people would somehow be armed with military tanks and F-35 fighter jets.
Palette finds arguments like this to be a bit rich. “Queer people are canaries in the gun-rights coal mine,” she says, arguing that gun owners who would exclude LGBTQ+ people from enjoying the same rights “are sawing off the branch upon which they sit.”
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“If Not Me, Then Who?”
Last spring, Rachel and Lilah attended a racial-justice demonstration in Richmond. Rachel brought along her guns to provide security for the demonstrators. Things got ugly. Someone, Rachel and Lilah say, tried to drive his car through the demonstrators. He bumped his hatchback into Rachel, who shouldered her rifle and got ready to prevent him from gunning the engine and killing people, as a neo-Nazi famously did in Charlottesville in 2017. Another person in the car urged the driver to turn around, Rachel and Lilah say, and he left without any shots fired.
Afterward, Rachel was depressed for days. Much of the reason, she says, was “just the realization that I’m capable of killing someone.” It’s one thing to see guns as a necessary and powerful tool of self-preservation. It’s quite another to grasp the source of that power. “It was the single worst day of my life,” she says. Still, when I ask if the incident has made her reconsider things, she says no: “It’s pretty much the thing of, you know, someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to keep these events safe. And it’s not the cops. And if not me, then who?”
Rachel and Lilah currently live outside Baltimore. Lilah likes it—she’s from the area. And Rachel? She likes it fine, for now, but would really prefer to return to Washington. With one big caveat. “If DC gun laws were better,” she says, “I’d move back.”
The clerk smiles. Rachel has done this before. It was her idea to meet at XCAL, a recreation center in Ashburn. A large, blocky building with megachurch aesthetics that’s indistinguishable from the government-contracting offices lining the highways nearby, XCAL offers a world-class gym and a range of classes including HIIT, martial arts, and barre. But downstairs, there’s something you won’t find at most other fitness facilities: three extremely fancy gun ranges.
One offers targets that can rotate 360 degrees. A “luxury range” has wide stalls perfect for groups. Spend a bit more money and you can rent a private range where you don’t have to worry about some bonehead with a shotgun disturbing your concentration. There’s also—sure, why not?—a nice cafe.
We watch a short safety video before approaching the rental counter. Rachel—who asked that Washingtonian not use her real name—looks at my gear, a Ruger 10/22 long rifle and cheap ear protectors. She accurately sizes me up: not exactly in the same league as her, gun-wise. Rachel brought a Glock 19 pistol, a heavily modified AR-pattern rifle, and hearing protectors with built-in microphones that will allow us to speak casually as our fellow firearms enthusiasts fill the air with tiny explosions. To rescue my reputation, I rent a Staccato P, a high-end nine-millimeter pistol with a $2,500 list price, as well as a couple hundred rounds of ammunition. Just for fun, we pick up some targets with colorful balloons.
I rarely discuss guns with others in Washington, where, let’s face it, being a gun owner is not always a popular hobby. But I’ve been shooting since I was a kid. For a long time, I had little interest in owning firearms or keeping up my skills. Two things changed in the past few years. My dad died and left me several of his rifles. Meanwhile, my 19-year-old son became an excellent target shooter, and going to the range is one of the few fun things he’ll still do with me. Even so, my feelings about guns are at best ambivalent. In DC, gunfire accounted for more than 90 percent of a record number of killings in 2023. More than half of all suicides in the US involve guns, and states with the fewest gun laws have significantly more suicides involving firearms than those with the most restrictions. Personally, I am entirely content just using guns to make holes in pieces of paper.
Rachel’s life is very, very different from mine. She was born in this century and grew up anti-gun as a child. She spent those years in Arlington, one of the most politically blue communities in the US—a jurisdiction where lawmakers and county residents organized protests against its only standalone gun shop when it opened in 2016. In 2021, Rachel came out to her parents as trans. The next year, she picked up a gun for the first time.
Some of Rachel’s interest stemmed from her growing embrace of far-left politics, as she decided “it’s kind of difficult to believe capitalism should be fought by any means necessary and also be against guns.” More important, she felt a threatening change in the cultural climate around trans people. Online talk got toxic. A trans friend was “swatted”—a method of harassment in which people call in false police reports to terrify their online enemies. That November, a man carrying an AR-15-style rifle entered Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, and killed five people, injuring many others. “I was probably a bit too online at that point,” Rachel says. “But the violence is also real.”
A friend brought Rachel to the Silver Eagle Group range in Ashburn and sold her a subcompact Ruger LCP pistol, which she hated—it was too puny, and the trigger felt wrong—but nevertheless learned to shoot with. She attended range days in Southern Maryland with a group called the Socialist Rifle Association, whose motto is “We Keep Us Safe.” Soon, thanks to the pretty good living she was making as a programmer, she bought the AR and the Glock, then learned how to modify her rifle by watching videos.
Rachel met her partner, Lilah, at a protest after reports that the Supreme Court planned to overturn Roe v. Wade. For Lilah, the looming SCOTUS decision was part of “a rising tide of fascism in this country” that peaked on January 6. With Rachel’s encouragement, Lilah, who had learned to shoot as a youngster but subsequently lost interest, picked up guns again. “All the people who want to kill the people I care about have guns,” Rachel says. “So I do, too.”
Gun Culture 2.0
Reasonable and unreasonable people alike disagree on what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote the Second Amendment, but there’s little doubt about the increasingly expansive way courts have interpreted the right to bear arms. It’s not so surprising that in recent years—a time defined by a disruptive and divisive pandemic, wrenching reckonings over race and sexual abuse, extreme political polarization and violence, a national homicide surge in 2020 and 2021, and a rinse-repeat cycle of mass shootings—gun ownership is rising.
In 2020, Americans bought a record number of guns. According to a firearms-industry trade group, 21 million background checks were conducted for the sale of a firearm—a 60-percent rise over the previous year—and four out of ten of those gun buyers had never owned one before. Last year, more than half of registered voters in an NBC News poll said they live in a household where someone owns a gun.
Historically, gun ownership has been concentrated among white men, particularly conservative men in rural areas. But that’s changing. Four years ago, NBC News found, about 24 percent of Black households owned guns. Now it’s 41 percent. The same percentage of Democratic households now own guns, up from 33 percent in 2004. David Yamane, a Wake Forest sociology professor, uses the term “Gun Culture 2.0” to describe this shift. His research shows that new gun owners are “more female, more racial minority, more urban.” There’s little specific data about how many in this cohort are LGBTQ+, Yamane says, but he wouldn’t be surprised if gun ownership among people like Rachel is becoming more common.
Broadly speaking, liberal and progressive politicians remain committed to gun control. Meanwhile, ordinary Americans in the demographic categories most likely to support those politicians are increasingly arming themselves. I went shooting with Rachel because I wanted to understand why. Yamane himself offers a hint. He grew up in the Bay Area, he says, and was 42 before he ever saw a gun in real life. After a scary incident with a neighbor in North Carolina, he began to look at firearms differently. Now he’s a gun owner, too.
Yamane is Japanese American, and Asian Americans are among the most prominent groups recently to take up more guns. This probably isn’t coincidental. Following the start of the pandemic, anti-Asian hate crimes experienced what a federal report called a “historic surge.” And according to FBI hate-crime data—which for various reasons almost certainly undercounts actual incidents across the country—attacks targeting people for their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religion have been rising for years. People on the left have long had reasons to be fearful, Yamane says, but “what maybe is new is people saying, ‘Hey, how do I defend myself against this? Maybe I should get a firearm.’ ”
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Hard Targets
Rachel comes across as a fairly typical member of Generation Z. She’s comfortable with diversity, freely discusses her mental health, and doesn’t always draw a hard line between online life and what older folks like me quaintly think of as the “real world.” On the day we met, she spent her morning driving her Prius around rural parts of Loudoun and Fairfax counties, visiting farm stands to buy vegetables for a vegan celebration of the fall equinox she and some fellow pagans had planned.
In all our conversations, however, Rachel told me about feeling unsafe or worrying about the safety of people around her. America has never been especially friendly toward LGBTQ+ people, and in recent years their growing cultural visibility and acceptance has sparked a backlash. Radical right-wing groups have harassed drag events, while some Republican politicians and self-proclaimed parents’-rights organizations have portrayed school lessons and library books about sexual orientation and gender identity as pedophilic tools for “grooming” children.
Meanwhile, governments in red and purple states have legislated specifically against trans people ages 13 to 17, who according to recent reports number about 300,000. Twenty-three states ban transgender kids from taking part in sports that align with their gender identities, 22 forbid gender-affirming healthcare, and nine ban people from using restrooms that don’t align with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Violence looms as well. A 2021 report from UCLA’s law school found that trans people are more than four times as likely as cisgender people to be victims of violent crime. One in four trans people polled by the health-policy research nonprofit KFF and the Washington Post said they’ve been physically attacked because of their identity. The FBI’s tally of hate crimes based on gender identity jumped 32 percent from 2021 to 2022—and again, the actual number is likely higher.
Rachel often feels scared to go out at night. “For a lot of us, it feels like we’re living in the years before something really bad happening,” she says. About a year after she came out, she says, she and her mom were arguing about gun ownership. (Mom is not a fan.) Her mother told her fear was just part of what “being a woman is. It is scary.” But Rachel doesn’t want to live that way. Guns, she says, offer a solution.
“I am a relatively small person,” Rachel says. “I can throw a very good punch, but with guns, you don’t need to worry about if the person you’re fighting is on drugs or is hopped up on adrenaline and can’t feel pain that much. They’re the great force equalizer.”
Rachel is hardly the first person on the left to take up arms. In the 1960s, the Black Panthers patrolled the streets of Oakland with guns to protect Black residents from police brutality. For a short period in the mid-1970s, a San Francisco group called the Lavender Panthers brandished sawed-off pool cues—and at least one .410 shotgun—while defending queer people from gay-bashers. Inspired by an incident in which a gay teenager in Arkansas was saved from a group of gay-bashers when his pistol-packing companion fired a warning shot over their heads, journalist Jonathan Rauch in 2000 called for gay people to “embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them.” That inspired the creation of the gay gun group Pink Pistols, whose motto is “Pick On Someone Your Own Caliber.”
Erin Palette, a trans lesbian from Florida, says she spent most of her younger years hearing that gun owners were “right-wing conservative males who hate queer people and want them dead.” But after the 2016 mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Palette—who became a gun owner in 2010 and was already a member of Pink Pistols—began to collect names of queer-friendly firearms instructors, under the name Operation Blazing Sword. The organization now has a directory of more than 1,500 volunteer educators—and in 2018 merged with Pink Pistols, where Palette is now the organization’s national coordinator. In that role, she has become a prominent Second Amendment advocate.
Palette doesn’t know exactly how many people are currently part of Pink Pistols. The group was formed, she says, “when you could still lose your job and face social ostracism for being outed as gay or any other form of queer. So the idea was, if no official paperwork exists, it can’t be subpoenaed.” However, she says there are currently 25 active chapters around the country and interest in the organization from people who want to shoot has grown since the Pulse shooting.
Palette says some conservatives have cheered that growth. After the Pulse shooting, she saw what she calls an “outpouring of love” from those on the right, including offers to accompany queer people on educational forays to ranges. But, ironically, while conservative supporters of gun rights have long argued that an armed populace is an essential defense against state tyranny, some LGBTQ+ people are now coming to the same conclusion about conservative government. After news leaked in the spring of 2022 that the Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe, whistleblower and trans woman Chelsea Manning posted on social media that “you should consider arming yourselves, then finding others to train with in teams and learn how to defend your community—we may need these skills in the very near future.”
For Palette, gun rights are LGBTQ+ rights, allowing queer people to defend themselves in a terrifying world. “Our continued success and our continued growth,” she says of Operation Blazing Sword and Pink Pistols, “points to the fact that, yeah, we are in danger.”
Culture Clash
While Gun Culture 2.0 has a fair amount in common with its conservative antecedent—both, at their core, are about feeling safe—the two tend not to mix. Consider Clara Elliott. She grew up in the Richmond area shooting alongside her dad, learning to fire flintlock rifles alongside modern firearms. Today, she splits her time between Virginia and Connecticut, where she has a business that teaches people to shoot.
In October 2020, Elliott took a course to teach others to become NRA-certified firearms instructors near Lynchburg, Virginia, where, she says, the instructor made jokes about Blacks, Muslims, and women. At a gun shop near Richmond that same year, she experienced more of the same. “There were Blacks, there were soccer moms, there were people of color, there were all these different groups in there,” she says. Some of the customers bristled at the new crowd. “Two guys were standing behind me in line, and they were talking about the blue-hair Antifa people trying to ruin our country.”
At the time, Elliott had blue hair. People who come to her for instruction, she says, expect “some guy standing in front of the classroom with, like, a tactical vest. That’s absolutely not me. I’m a trans woman.” Indeed, Elliott’s business is named ATW Firearms Instruction; the initials stand for Armed Trans Women. She mostly teaches LGBTQ+ people, but also people of color and Muslims—groups, she says, who are often uncomfortable in traditional, conservative gun spaces.
Yamane says this discomfort is common among newer gun owners, including him. “I don’t want to see a ‘Trump 2024’ flag hanging at the top of the front door of any gun space,” he says. “It’s 100 percent true that when I hear the kind of culture-warrior arguments coming out of the gun community that tie gun ownership to all of those other things—you know, hordes are coming over the border and welfare cheats and, you know, dangerous Black people taking over cities—that stuff just makes me kind of repelled from identification as a gun owner.”
Into this breach, left-wing gun owners have created their own groups, with names such as the Liberal Gun Club and the John Brown Gun Club. Many participants, Palette says, are simply looking for instruction that doesn’t make them feel like second-class citizens. Shooting with the Socialist Rifle Association, Rachel says, “was the first time that I’ve ever felt truly comfortable at a range. Because it was mostly other queer people.” In her courses, Elliott teaches the importance of first aid and deescalation techniques alongside firearms knowledge. Class fees are on a sliding scale, and she sends free self-defense kits to trans and nonbinary people. The kits include a stun gun, pepper spray, and box cutters—but also condoms and lip balm, because, Elliott says, “protecting yourself is more than just being able to be armed.” She’s written a zine about gun safety, which she sells in ATW’s online shop alongside stickers that say “Trantifa” and mugs that read “This Queer Shoots Back.”
For Charlotte Clymer, though, there’s nothing cute about gun ownership. The writer and LGBTQ+ activist is a trans woman who’s also an Army veteran. “I think it is completely rational for a trans person to decide to purchase a firearm for self-defense,” she says—provided that such a person trains to be a responsible gun owner. What worries her is what she describes as an online trend of trans people posting photos of themselves holding guns and acting like there’s something funny about gearing up: “I really do think a lot of trans people are gravitating towards this idea that doing an ironic show of force will be helpful for their own safety and for the safety of the community at large. All that does is provoke a sense of distrust and anger in people who are already anti-trans.”
At any rate, the percentage of LGBTQ+ people who actually own guns is probably relatively small. A 2018 UCLA law school survey found that while 35 percent of straight adults have a gun at home, only 19 percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults do. Similarly, LGBTQ+ people are more likely than straight people to support stronger gun-control laws. “Anybody who’s a left-leaning gun owner does find themselves politically and culturally homeless,” Yamane says.
Chris Cheng can relate. A gay man who won the History Channel’s Top Shot competition in 2012 and then quit his job at Google to become an advocate for shooting sports and gun rights, Cheng says many gay people are “stuck in the gun closet,” wary of the social and even career effects of coming out as gun owners: “The gay community is so intolerant of views that do not line up with your traditional kind of liberal Democrat.”
Anybody who’s a left-leaning gun owner does find themselves politically and culturally homeless
In some ways, Cheng has managed to bridge the political gap between gun cultures. He’s worked as a commentator on NRA News but also testified before Congress about how racism has manifested through gun control. (In many Southern states after Reconstruction, gun laws were enacted with the express purpose of preventing Blacks from owning firearms, and Native Americans still can’t use a tribal ID to buy a gun.) His book, Shoot to Win: Tips, Tactics, and Techniques to Help You Shoot Like a Pro, features a complimentary blurb from right-wing firebrand Dana Loesch. “I often say that the gun community is way more diverse than the gay community,” Cheng says.
Still, conservative acceptance of gun culture’s changing face is not exactly the norm. When, in June 2021, the gun magazine Recoil shared a cover on Instagram depicting Cheng posing with a rifle in a rainbow-flag T-shirt, commenters flipped out about “cultural Marxism” and the “promotion” of homosexuality. Despite the fact that 96 percent of mass shootings are committed by straight, cisgender males, some right-wing voices have seized on the fact that a handful of shooters may have identified as trans to call for restrictions on the ability of all trans people to own guns.
Last March, then–Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson reacted with dismissive skepticism to an NPR story about Rainbow Reload, a queer gun group formed to defend members from hate attacks. After first acknowledging that he supported “American citizens carrying firearms,” Carlson told his audience that the group was not exercising the Second Amendment but rather engaging in “political hysteria.” Asking, “What’s the limit to this?,” Carlson imagined a scenario in which trans people would somehow be armed with military tanks and F-35 fighter jets.
Palette finds arguments like this to be a bit rich. “Queer people are canaries in the gun-rights coal mine,” she says, arguing that gun owners who would exclude LGBTQ+ people from enjoying the same rights “are sawing off the branch upon which they sit.”
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“If Not Me, Then Who?”
Last spring, Rachel and Lilah attended a racial-justice demonstration in Richmond. Rachel brought along her guns to provide security for the demonstrators. Things got ugly. Someone, Rachel and Lilah say, tried to drive his car through the demonstrators. He bumped his hatchback into Rachel, who shouldered her rifle and got ready to prevent him from gunning the engine and killing people, as a neo-Nazi famously did in Charlottesville in 2017. Another person in the car urged the driver to turn around, Rachel and Lilah say, and he left without any shots fired.
Afterward, Rachel was depressed for days. Much of the reason, she says, was “just the realization that I’m capable of killing someone.” It’s one thing to see guns as a necessary and powerful tool of self-preservation. It’s quite another to grasp the source of that power. “It was the single worst day of my life,” she says. Still, when I ask if the incident has made her reconsider things, she says no: “It’s pretty much the thing of, you know, someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to keep these events safe. And it’s not the cops. And if not me, then who?”
Rachel and Lilah currently live outside Baltimore. Lilah likes it—she’s from the area. And Rachel? She likes it fine, for now, but would really prefer to return to Washington. With one big caveat. “If DC gun laws were better,” she says, “I’d move back.”
This article appears in the February 2024 issue of Washingtonian.
