Pink Pistols: LGBT Gun Owners Unite in Arming Gay Community

Sadly not much has actually changed since Shepard’s slaughter almost 20 years ago. There were 1,260 anti-LGBT incidents reported in 1998, versus 1,402 in 2011, the most recent year for which numbers are available. And the hateful rhetoric remains. Even post-Orlando, Sacramento-based Baptist minister Roger Jimenez celebrated Omar Mateen’s massacre: “The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die.” (“Them” means “queers” here, of course.) “I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put a firing squad in front of them, and blow their brains out.”

It is this type of hatred that the Pink Pistols hope to counteract by creating a community that defies predictable political alignments. And not only at the shooting range: besides getting together for target practice, the Pink Pistols have joined up with larger, more powerful gun lobby groups like the NRA in supporting high-profile court cases, including District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 case in which Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment extends to individuals, not just well-regulated militias. (Pink Pistols spokeswoman Gwendolyn Patton declined an interview for this story.)

Of course the seemingly innate divide between gay rights and gun rights, one reinforced by widespread stereotypes, can complicate interpersonal relationships. “This guy I was dating asked me, ‘Do you carry a gun to shoot people?'” Bloovman tells me. “But I just shift the paradigm and say, ‘I carry a gun to protect people.'”

I’m sitting in the wood-paneled basement of the shooting range with Bloovman, who is also studying to be a nurse. Standing at 5-feet-10 inches and 185 pounds, broad-shouldered Bloovman regularly carries a loaded Glock 17, a spare magazine, two different types of knives, pepper spray, a flashlight and a medical trauma kit that includes Russell Chest Seal, a product that does just what it name suggests. He also owns an AR-15, a weapon very similar to the one Mateen used to devastating effect at Pulse. 

“I wish that I didn’t have to carry all this crap,” says Bloovman, who’s as much concerned about general violence as he is about anti-gay attacks. “But unfortunately there are people who want to hurt you. I carry guns because I want to protect myself and my loved ones and potentially an innocent third party from being victimized.”

In addition to studying the universal rules of handling a gun — always treat it as if it’s loaded, and “never let the muzzle cross anything I am not willing to kill, destroy or buy” — I also learn there are two types of bullets: ball ammo, which are used for shooting at targets, and hollow points, which cops use and which petals out when it enters the body, keeping it in its place and preventing the bullet from exiting the target and entering a bystander. Though Bloovman insists that “the purpose of shooting someone is not to kill them, but to stop them,” the goal is also to inflict the most damage. “If lethal force is justified, we need to ventilate them as rapidly as possible to stop them from what they’re doing.”