Posted on

The Group that Wants to Arm Gay America

Pink Pistols

What if the Orlando clubgoers had been armed? Pink Pistols wages a battle to get LGBT people to carry.

By Julia Ioffe

June 13, 2016

Within hours of the shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Gwendolyn Patton was on the case. She sat down, banged out a press release and posted it on her website. “This is exactly the kind of heinous act that justifies our existence,” it read. Swatting away the pleas for gun control she knew would follow in the wake of a high-profile mass shooting, Patton wrote: “At such a time of tragedy, let us not reach for the low-hanging fruit of blaming the killer’s guns,” she went on. “A human being did this. The human being’s tools are unimportant when compared to the bleakness of that person’s soul.” She lamented that the revelers mowed down at the Pulse were practically sitting ducks: In Florida, even though gun laws are quite loose, you’re not allowed to carry firearms in a place that serves alcohol. What if there were a designated carrier, she wondered? Someone tasked with remaining sober and toting a gun around a bar? “It’s sad that we must consider such things,” she concluded, “but when there are persons out there who mean us harm, we must find ways to protect ourselves within the law.”

Read more: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/the-gun-group-that-wants-to-arm-gay-america-213961#ixzz4BY1UGWhL