Repost from LGBT Group: Gay Americans are arming themselves to stay alive

[friendly_iconoclast]

https://www.democraticunderground.com/113750648

“I don’t want to get beaten to death, stabbed and burnt alive,” a slight woman with long blond hair and a checked shirt says. “I want a gun to feel equal.”

She is a member of one of the United States’ fastest-growing gun clubs, the jauntily named Pink Pistols.

Two years after the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, gay, lesbian and transgender Americans are nervous. According to the Human Rights Center (HRC), a US LGBTI advocacy group, 52 gay people were murdered in the US last year because of their sexuality, and 28 transgender people met the same fate.

In increasing numbers, they are fighting back by taking up arms.

https://nypost.com/2018/06/12/gay-americans-are-arming-themselves-to-stay-alive/

Trailer here:

[guillaumeb]

1. What could go wrong? eom

[friendly_iconoclast]

2. A rather vague innuendo-maybe you could explain your 'concerns' about this for us...

[guillaumeb]

3. I thought it was quite clear.

What did you see?

[friendly_iconoclast]

4. We are all free to choose unarmed self-defense at any time

These folks apparently feel that something more forceful might be in order if KKKLetus and friends decide
to go on a bashing spree and they become a target.

That is their right, and I wholeheartedly support their informed choice to exercise it.



Of course, LGBTQ people aren't the first persecuted minority with members that made that decision:

https://www.dukeupress.edu/this-nonviolent-stuffll-get-you-killed

This Nonviolent Stuff?ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Description

Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self-defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama, home as "an arsenal." Like King, many ostensibly "nonviolent" civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, Charles E. Cobb Jr. recovers this history, describing the vital role that armed self-defense has played in the survival and liberation of black communities. Drawing on his experiences in the civil rights movement and giving voice to its participants, Cobb lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the long history and importance of African Americans taking up arms to defend themselves against white supremacist violence.

[guillaumeb]

10. I remember watching a Youtube video

wherein a white man was walking with a weapon on his shoulder. The police drove by.


Then, a black man walked by, again, with a weapon on his shoulder. The reaction by the police was quite different.

This experiment was conducted by a group to show how the police react to different scenarios.

[friendly_iconoclast]

12. Uneven support for rights does not indicate those rights shouldn't be exercised, IMHO

[guillaumeb]

13. Agreed. eom

[msongs]

5. number one reason to own a gun? protect one's self from gun owners. nt

[gejohnston]

6. Except

Many are not committed with guns. Knives and machetes are common murder weapon in much of the world, and the preferred choice of MS13 in the US

[friendly_iconoclast]

7. Your interlocutor seems to have 'forgotten' the always-popular-with-violent-bigots 'group assault'

And also apparently didn't read the first sentence of the OP:

“I don’t want to get beaten to death, stabbed and burnt alive,”

I've noticed over the years that many (if not most) of the more vocally gun-averse expect victims
of violent crimes to "take one for the team"...

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

8. Expecting the average joe...

...to become a violent hating criminal says a lot about the mindset of the "take one for the team" group.

[yagotme]

11. So, you're protecting yourself from yourself??? nt

[DashOneBravo]

9. K&R!