“If the world is dangerous, then you have to be dangerous back,” said Fin Smith, the organizer for Rainbow Reload in New Hampshire. What he didn’t say is that people on the left believe that only applies to them.
Rainbow Reload is one of a growing number of “pink pistol clubs.” These are clubs for LGBTQ+ people and people of color, where they can meet and learn about firearms and improve their safety. These clubs have been around since at least 2020. They serve a large group within the LGBTQ+ community. A recent study found 21.5 percent of LGBTQ+ people own a firearm, compared to 36 percent of straight people.
The goal of the pink pistol clubs is commendable. Everyone who owns a firearm should know how to use it properly. However, there are two problems with pink gun clubs. The first is that they exclude straight, White people, and in doing so, they violate people’s civil rights.
While they can do this as a private club, they have to be aware they might want to practice at a shooting range that is considered a private club. If that club refused to let them use the range, members of the pink pistol club, the media and politicians would start protesting how the pink pistol club members’ rights were being violated while ignoring the hypocrisy that the pink pistol club is excluding certain people from its memberships.
The solution is to open their membership and let people self-exclude as they do from other pistol clubs.
However, the larger hypocrisy is not so easily solved and not the problem of the pink pistol club.
The Second Amendment protects every citizen, which means all Americans have the right to bear arms. However, some are quick to attack gun owners as the cause of all the violence in the country. They regularly support legislation that impinges on Americans’ right to bear arms.
Except in this case. NPR, which can be counted on to blame gun violence on the guns and support restrictive legislation, is supportive of pink pistol clubs.
As Tucker Carlson with Fox News said recently, “Guns are bad except when the enforcers of its ideology have guns. You can’t have guns, but faithful servants of the Democratic Party can.”
So why do members of pink pistol clubs want to own a firearm? “Mass shootings targeting LGBTQ spaces and a rise in anti-trans rhetoric have inspired some queer people to take up arms,” accordingto NPR.
In other words: self-defense. However, if a straight, White person says he or she wants a gun for self-defense, they are criticized and ridiculed.
Members of these groups are also discovering the problems that opponents create for gun owners. In Oregon, where the Democrats passed restrictive gun-control laws last year, LGBTQ+ people are worried that the law will prevent them from buying guns, according to NPR. Where was that worry for everyone else when the legislation was in the legislature?
As Carlson pointed out, the “same National Public Radio, state radio, state media, controlled by the Biden administration, (are) encouraging people to go to the gun store immediately.”
So, congratulations, pink pistol club members. Here’s hoping you are as loud and persistent in supporting your Second Amendment rights as you are in supporting your sexual identity.
