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Jonathan Fischer is never sure who’s going to be more surprised when he, as he likes to put it, comes out of the gun closet — the gun aficionados who find out he’s gay or the gay friends who find out he likes shooting guns.
When the 38-year-old television editor showed up last month to a defensive handgun class near Piru with a Glock 27 pistol on his hip, he wore a T-shirt sporting a rainbow-colored AK-47. His “gay-K-47,” he said.
In the days after 49 people were fatally shot at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., this summer, Fischer wanted to do something to make his community safer. So he started the West Hollywood chapter of the Pink Pistols — a loosely organized, national LGBT gun group.
“If someone was to try and break into my home, and especially if someone were armed, I don’t want to fight back with a kitchen knife,” Fischer said. “And I don’t think that’s extremist or crazy.”
Interest in the Pink Pistols has increased since the Orlando attack, with new chapters springing up across the country, including the West Hollywood chapter and another one in North Hollywood. There was such an outpouring of support from firearms trainers, many of them straight, that the Pink Pistols’ website now has a map listing LGBT-friendly firearms instructors in every state.
The week of the attack, signs depicting a rainbow-colored Gadsden flag and the hashtag #ShootBack appeared in West Hollywood, where an estimated 46% of the population identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. City officials were outraged.
“Even during our heightened days of civil disobedience and protest, we have only advocated peaceful means, never arming ourselves and retaliating with violence,” said City Councilman John Duran, who is gay.
Gwendolyn Patton, the national spokeswoman for the Pink Pistols, has spent the summer trying to keep up with the all inquiries about the group and how to start new chapters.
“People don’t like to feel helpless,” said Patton, a lesbian who lives outside Philadelphia.
originally posted by: jaynkeel
Orlando is just a giant cesspool of nothing good. Might as well call it the Chicago of the south, neverending violence down there. They can keep it I'd rather avoid Orlando.. But did notice this in the news this am
www.mynews13.com...
originally posted by: Puppylove
Is one of the things that annoys me about the holocaust it's always made out to be about the Jews simply because they were in greater number.
Personally, I think right and left are using us and manipulating us, at least democrats and republicans. But here's many of the perceptions causing a shift for some in my community.
originally posted by: MongolianPaellaFish
The LGBT community has never been opposed to guns as a whole, so there is no 'going against the grain' here.