When Nicki Stallard was transitioning from male to female, she didn’t buy the safety advice that many within the LGBT community were giving to people like her.

“The premise was you should carry a whistle, blow it if you got attacked, and someone would come and help you or call the police,” said the 57-year-old who recently moved from San Jose to Fresno. “But the sad reality is a lot of people ignore the whistles and don’t want to get involved.”

So instead, Stallard turned to a gun for self-defense and now has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. She is one of the organizers for the San Jose chapter of the Pink Pistols, a loosely organized national group that encourages people in the LGBT community to learn how to use firearms. The Pink Pistols, whose motto is “Pick on someone your own caliber,” was founded in 2000 in response to the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was tortured and murdered in Wyoming in 1998. Interest in the group has increased since the June 12 massacre at the Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed by a gunman who reportedly had made homophobic slurs.

Gwen Patton, the Pink Pistols’ national spokesperson, said several new chapters have sprung up since then. Likes on the group’s Facebook page have grown from 1,400 to 9,000. Local chapters teach gun safety, hold once-a-month target practices and help people get firearm permits.

“The people who would prey on the LGBT community chiefly did so because they saw us as weak and defenseless,” Patton said. “We say in our mission statement that we teach queers to shoot, and we teach the world that we’ve done so.”

There are two chapters in the South Bay and East Bay in San Jose and Oakland. Organized shoots typically draw 15 or fewer participants. Those who come out to target practice include software engineers, architects, postal workers, machinists, engineers and business executives.

On Wednesday, 10 people turned out for the Oakland chapter’s shooting practice at the San Leandro Rifle & Pistol Range. Shell casings flew through the air as the members — all wearing eye and ear protection — fired at targets with semi-automatic handguns and revolvers.

It was Jeff Hempel’s first Pink Pistols shoot. Hempel, who is gay, said he was seeking an alternative to the hyper-masculine culture of many shooting clubs. His interest started as a hobby, and he wanted to make sure he knew how to safely use his weapon.

“I bought an XD Springfield Armory in January,” Hempel said. “I’ve been getting some great guidance here from people who are experienced shooters.”

Nearby, Kayla Harris, a 31-year-old Oakland resident who is transgender, said she joined the Pink Pistols a year ago during Donald Trump’s election campaign because of an uptick in violence and hate speech.

“A lot of people in my community were interested in learning to shoot guns and since that was a skill set I already had, I thought it would be a good place to donate my time,” said Harris, who is a certified NRA pistol and rifle trainer.

About 20 percent of reported single-bias hate crimes reported in 2014 were victims targeted because of their sexual orientation or nonconforming gender identity, according to the FBI. That was second only to racially based violence.

Not all LGBTQ groups support gun ownership. After the Pulse mass shooting, more than 50 LGBT organizations signed a pledge supporting tighter gun control. Gays Against Guns, which formed after the tragedy, said people who carry firearms in public are at greater risk of being hurt and that the Pink Pistols’ push to arm the LGBT community is a misguided campaign based on emotion rather than facts.

“People are thinking that this is the Wild West and you’ve got to get a gun to be able to survive, and it’s insanity,” said Terry Roethlein. “We’re pushing up against that because the reality is, you’re just making things worse by creating an environment where there are guns everywhere.”

The New York-based group recently launched a campaign against National Rifle Association-backed legislation that would require states that issue concealed gun permits to legally recognize those issued by other states. The Pink Pistols’ national leadership, meanwhile, supports the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017.

The political views of participants in local chapters run the spectrum. Stallard is a Republican and a card-carrying lifetime NRA member, adamant about fighting laws that she said infringe on Second Amendment rights. Harris, on the other hand, opposes what she calls the NRA’s “politically polarizing” policies.

Those diverse political views take a back seat at the range, where Darcy Nelson, an Oakland chapter organizer, and her girlfriend, Alexandria Kellner, took turns at the target with Nelson’s Sig Sauer p 226 pistol.

Nelson, a 30-year-old software engineer in Oakland who served two tours in the military in Iraq, bought a handgun for self-defense in 2014. She said it was in response to #gamergate, an internet hate campaign targeting women in the video game industry.

“I was working in the game industry at the time and living in an unsecured house on a major street in Concord,” said Nelson, who is lesbian.

She said she joined the Pink Pistols because she wanted to go shooting with other liberal-minded people.

Most participants are from the LBGT community, but a number of straight women have joined in too, said Dave Truslow , one of the San Jose organizers who attended the recent practice in San Leandro.

“We quite deliberately don’t refer to ourselves as an LGBT shooting group, but we say that we’re LGBT-friendly,” said Truslow, who is gay. “We don’t want to exclude anyone.”

Pink Pistols organizers said that though they’re training people to use firearms for protection, guns should be used only as a last resort.

“We have a lot of people in this country who want to reach for a firearm any time something goes sideways,” Nelson said. “I definitely do not advocate that.”