Julia Ioffe is contributing writer at Politico Magazine.

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.”

It’s a similar argument to the one voiced after all such shootings: shooting in a school? Arm the teacher. Shooting in a movie theater? Arm the theater-goers. What makes Patton’s call to arms a little different is that she is not part of the NRA or the Republican Party. She is a Libertarian at the head of Pink Pistols, which describes itself as “an international GLBT self-defense organization” and whose slogan is “Pick on someone your own caliber.” And so: Shooting at a gay nightclub? Arm gay people.


In the wake of the Orlando shooting, it’s hard to imagine an advocacy group more precisely tuned to the moment than Pink Pistols. Founded in 2000 and claiming 45 chapters around the country and three more globally, it sits at one of the most uneasy intersections in American politics. Its closest natural allies on both sides mostly hate each other. “A large number of our members don’t like the NRA,” Patton says. “A lot of them remember when members of the NRA had things to say about gay community.” There was the time NRA board member Ted Nugent said “the homosexuals could come down on the court, hold hands and prance around the court to music by the Village People.” Or the time the NRA dropped a law firm that had decided to stop representing House Republicans in their support of the Defense of Marriage Act.

And yet the Pink Pistols have often sided with and even helped the NRA in some of their most pivotal court battles. In 2002, Pink Pistols filed an amicus brief in the Silveira v. Lockyer case, which tried to overturn an assault weapons ban in California but in which the court ruled that the Second Amendment doesn’t guarantee an individual right to bear arms. That ruling was effectively nullified eight years later in the Supreme Court ruling on District of Columbia v. Heller decision of 2010, which said that the Second Amendment does in fact guarantee an individual right. The Pink Pistols filed an amicus brief in that case as well. They argued that gun control laws disproportionately and adversely affect LGBT individuals because LGBT individuals are disproportionately targeted for hate crimes. Patton likes to cite the FBI’s own statistics: the number of hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation is second only to those motivated by racial hatred. “Because LGBT individuals cannot count on the police to protect them from such violence,” Pink Pistols wrote in their brief, “their safety depends upon this Court’s recognition of their right to possess firearms for self-protection in the home.”

This month, the Pink Pistols D.C. chapter has also won an injunction against a local provision that residents must prove they have a “good reason” to get a carry permit.

If some people might detect a tragic irony in the fact that the Pink Pistols helped overturn an assault weapons ban, and then an assault weapon was used to kill 50 gay club-goers in Florida, Patton doesn’t see it. “It doesn’t make a difference,” she says. “He could’ve had a much more powerful handgun than that rifle.” After a long disquisition about the relative power of a hunting rifle versus a handgun versus the AR-15 the Orlando shooter used, Patton explains that the AR-15 is actually less lethal because it uses more harmless bullets. “It’s a tiny bullet,” she says. “It’s not particularly heavy, or have much kinetic energy. It’s not a powerful round. The reason that caliber is used by military is that it’s light and more of them can be carried into battle.” And what if the attacker had a suicide bomb strapped to his chest? What of that? “That will do far more damage than a gun,” Patton says.

The group’s ethos goes back to its founding in 2000, during a different time both for gun rights and gay rights. “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act were still the laws of the land; it was two years after Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die tied to a Wyoming fence. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban was still in effect; gun sales were half of what they are today.

It was in this environment that Jonathan Rauch, a prominent gay journalist, wrote a column called “Pink Pistols,” from which Patton’s organization takes its name. Rauch called on gays to band together in “Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible.” The point, Rauch wrote, was to change the image of gays, both in the heterosexual and homosexual universes. “Since time immemorial, weakness has been a defining stereotype of homosexuality,” Rauch wrote. “Think of the words you heard on the school playground: ‘limp-wrist,’ ‘pansy,’ ‘panty-waist,’ ‘fairy.’ No other minority has been so consistently identified with contemptible weakness.”

But if gays carried concealed weapons, he argued, and homophobes didn’t know which gays did and which didn’t, it would drive down attacks on gays, and it would change their self-image from one of weakness to one of empowerment. “If it became widely known that homosexuals carry guns and know how to use them, not many bullets would need to be fired,” Rauch wrote. “So let's make gay-bashing dangerous.”

The Pink Pistols were also tapping into a long American tradition: using weapons, explicitly or implicitly, to back up a peaceful demand for civil rights. The movement for black civil rights, for instance, was not uniformly nonviolent: Martin Luther King, Jr. is said to have kept a pistol for protection. "The tradition of armed-self defense in Afro-American history cannot be disconnected from the success of what today is called the nonviolent civil rights movement," writes historian Charles E. Cobb, Jr. in his book This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed.

When Patton saw Rauch’s column, she took it to heart. Before she had come out as a lesbian, she was sexually assaulted by a man. She wonders still: if she’d had a gun, would it have turned out differently? She founded her own chapter, the Delaware Valley Pink Pistols, in the Philadelphia area in 2001. After the Sandy Hook shootings shocked her into action, she took over Pink Pistols from its founder and anointed herself First Speaker, a title she got from science fiction. “After that it was just a matter of keeping the organization running,” Patton says, “writing new documentation, improving processes, and occasionally having to answer tragedy like the one we had this morning.” (This is a polite understatement: in addition to all the legal lobbying, the group also trains gays in self-defense, and organizes meetings at shooting ranges.)

Patton doesn’t have a count of her members; there is no membership form, no dues, and members don’t even have to notify the organization after they decide to identify with its principles. Patton estimates their membership is anywhere from 1,500 to 25,000. And some of the stories they tell are hair-raising. There was the gay man coming out of a gay club in Philadelphia who was followed by men with lengths of pipe. He was saved, Patton says, only by pulling out his .38. There was the New England lesbian couple with the gay pride flag on their house who shot an intruder in the throat.

They are chilling stories, but when I ask Patton for more examples, she demurs. “I’ll be perfectly honest with you,” she finally says. “It’s a bit of a tiger repellent situation. There’s no tigers out there, so it must be working.” In part, this because the Pink Pistols aren’t as stridently Rambo-like as other gun-rights groups. Their goal is to protect LGBT individuals “using the best tool available,” Patton says. “If a law in a particular area doesn’t allow firearm, go with next best available tool.” Pepper spray, a knife, or running away and calling the police. “The desired goal isn’t to have incidents, it’s to prevent incidents,” she explains. “If we have no events, then, as far as we’re concerned, that’s ideal.”

Patton is sure that the Pink Pistols strategy is working, but she can’t really put her finger on precisely how it’s working and how often. “If it happens and someone pulls a gun and the person runs away, then even if you call the police, how do you record it?” she says. “It’s a non-incident. It fades into the memories of the people it happened, people who probably don’t even want to talk about it.” Fair enough, I say, and ask her to put out a call to Pink Pistols members who would want to share their story of a hate crime averted.

“I would love to hear their stories,” I say.

“As would I,” Patton says. “I love hearing about how what we do works.”

