In 2000, Jonathan Rauch, an openly-gay columnist wrote an article for Salon.com. This
article set the pattern for an organization, though he didn’t know it yet.
“I WON’T quibble over the pros and cons of hate-crimes laws. In a way, I
don’t need to, because the numbers speak for themselves: the laws are at
best insufficient, at worst ineffective. Anti-gay crimes reported to the FBI
almost doubled between 1992 and 1998. The National Coalition of
Anti-Violence Programs monitors 16 jurisdictions and found 33 anti-gay
murders in 1998, up from 14 in 1997. The coalition also found that
gay-bashers were becoming more likely to use deadly weapons: guns,
baseball bats, knives. There is not a city in America where gay couples
can hold hands in public without fear. Gay-bashing is a kind of low-level
terrorism designed to signal that, whatever the law may say, queers are
pathetic and grotesque. Beyond a certain point, therefore, law can’t be the
answer.
So it is remarkable that the gay movement in America has never seriously
considered a strategy that ought to be glaringly obvious. Thirty-one states
allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states,
homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable
with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up
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.”
This article was noticed by a Pennsylvania activist and reporter named Vin Suprynowicz,
who told a Boston resident and former libertarian candidate for Massachusetts State
Representative, named Douglas Krick. Krikket, as most know him, got together with
three other friends, and formed a sort of club. The four of them together, all members of
the sexual-minority community, would meet at a local firing range to practice together.
Inspired by the article, they got permission from Rauch to call the group the “Pink
Pistols”.
At first, this was a sort of joke, so much so that Krikket acquired the domain
“pinkpistols.org”, and set up a website extolling their activities. He was contacted in
September of 2000 by Newsweek magazine, and after a small article about a “a new
pro-gun, pro-gay political-action group”, Krikket received what he least expected: notes
from people across the country, asking if they, too, could start Pink Pistols “chapters”.
Bemused by this, Krikket said “sure”. This started the snowball rolling downhill.
Like that snowball, it got bigger and bigger as it rolled, until there were about a dozen
chapters across the country.
In the spring of 2001, my partner Maggie showed me an article about the “Pink Pistols”,
and said it looked like a really good idea, and that I might be interested. I was startled to
see the name Doug Krick associated with it, but pleased at the same time. I have known
Krikket since the mid to late ‘80s, when we both lived in the western suburbs of Chicago.
We were very close then, working on science-fiction conventions together, getting
together to watch bad movies, and, when he decided to get married, he asked me to
officiate the ceremony, as I was both his High Priestess and a (dubiously) ordained
minister through the Universal Life Church (my father had thought it a great joke when I
was about 16 to give me a ULC card and proclaim me a minister).
I contacted my old friend and congratulated him on his newfound fame, and the
organization itself. He remarked that there wasn’t a chapter in the Philadelphia area,
where I now lived with Maggie, and suggested that I start one. After discussing it with
Maggie, we agreed. We acquired our Pennsylvania License To Carry Firearms, and I
got my first gun for my birthday at the end of April, 2001. Our first chapter meeting was
just a couple of weeks later, which no one but us attended. But a month later, having
moved to a new area with a better lunchtime meeting place and a far superior shooting
range, we had one attendee, Thomas Nelson of Philadelphia. After that, we attracted
more and more attendees, some of whom are still with us to this date.
I have always been involved in various aspects of media, including a short radio
internship while in college, so I soon found myself helping Krikket with the greater and
greater number of interviews and requests for information. Just a year or so later, he
officially made me the National Media Spokesperson of the organization. The title
changed to International Media Spokesperson when we acquired our chapter in British
Columbia, and then another in South Africa. We even got a couple of requests from
Israel, but they never materialized.
The Delaware Valley Chapter, my Philadelphia, suburban, and South Jersey chapter,
soon became well-known as the media chapter, and we fielded a growing number of
requests for interviews, including local television, magazines such as Jane and OUT,
and, pièce de résistance, a documentary by Voice of America TV. This documentary was
translated into 60 languages, and sent all over the world. I even fielded a nearly-surreal
debacle on Fox News, when a contributing analyst conflated several unrelated news
stories, and declared that the “Pink Pistol Packing Group” was a network of lesbian
gangs, using pink-painted guns to terrorize young girls into declaring themselves
lesbians. It was, of course, complete nonsense, and I eventually won an apology and
retraction from the Bill O’Reilly show, after dozens of reporters called me to ask if they
meant US. (Of course, Bill O. didn’t give the apology himself…he waited until he was
taking a day off, and Michelle Malkin delivered it.)
http://www.nytimes.com/cq/2007/07/16/cq_3090.html
Several very important and far-reaching articles came from that: One from Radar Online,
one from Reason, another from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s magazine, and last,
but not least, the next issue of Congressional Quarterly. We started being solicited for
our opinions on important court cases involving firearm rights, including Silviera v.
Lockyer, which addressed so-called “assault weapons” in California, State of Illinois, v.
Alberto Aguilar, which addressed firearm carry in Illinois, and an amicus brief for the
famous the District of Columbia v. Heller
(http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publishing/preview/publiced_preview_brief
s_pdfs_07_08_07_290_RespondentAmCuPinkPistolsGLIL.authcheckdam.pdf)
This was the SCOTUS case that finally clarified that the people have an individual right
to keep and bear arms. We did not prepare a brief for McDonald v. the City of Chicago,
(130 S.Ct. 3020 (2010)) but the Heller brief was mentioned and briefly quoted:
Amici supporting incorporation of the right to keep and bear arms contend that the right is especially
important for women and members of other groups that may be especially vulnerable to violent crime.[33
…
[33] See Brief for Women State Legislators et al. as Amici Curiae 9-10, 14-15; Brief for Jews for the
Preservation of Firearms Ownership as Amicus Curiae 3-4; see also Brief for Pink Pistols et al. as Amici
Curiae in District of Columbia v. Heller, O.T.2007, No. 07-290, pp. 5-11.
This spanned a period of 9 years between the inception of the organization and the time
of the McDonald case. During this time, Krikket needed to take several hiatuses to
handle his own personal issues, and he asked me to step up to run things in his
absence. I believe there were four such absences over the years. It was during this time
that we achieved over 50 chapters nationwide, and the core message and focus of the
organization was firmly established.
The focus of the group is as Rauch originally suggested. I put it, rather poetically, as
this: We teach queers to shoot, then teach the world that we have done it. This
serves two key purposes, first, to prepare members of the sexual-minority community
with the skills and knowledge necessary to take individual responsibility for their own
protection, and to spread the word of this fact, so anyone considering performing a bias
attack on a member of the GLBT community might think: “Gee, this person might have a
gun. I can’t tell which gay person might be armed, and which are safe to attack. Maybe I
should go to a movie instead…” — or something similar. In short, it is meant as a
deterrent. When weapons are concealed, one cannot tell who is or is not armed.
During this entire time, we had only articles about the organization, a “new chapter
e-book” with suggestions on how to start a chapter (now largely obsolete; technology
has changed much that was suggested), and a few brief white papers on bridging gaps
between communities for members and chapter founders to work from. We had not
perfected the process for creating chapters, but we were learning. We had some growing
pains, a couple which resulted in “schisms” in the organization, and the birth of at least
three other GLBT firearm advocacy groups. We did a plethora of interviews, in print,
radio, and television. The group even inspired a television series to create a similar
group as a plot point, the “Pink Posse”, a so-called vigilante group in the show “Queer As
Folk”. We knew we had “made it” when the 2005 Pride Dictionary officially defined “Pink
Pistol” as a gay person who carried a firearm for self-defense. Things were very good,
but there were bumps in the road along the way.
by Gwendolyn S. Patton, First Speaker