westfailia:

commune-or-nothing:

The former pacifist pumped a shotgun at the firing line.

Lore McSpadden never touched a gun before the Trigger Warning Queer & Trans Gun Club started this past year. Now McSpadden is among the shooters routinely yelling, “Pull!” and blasting at clay pigeons angling over a mowed field near Rochester.

Trigger Warning members are anxious about armed and organized extremists who seem increasingly emboldened. Their response has a touch of symmetry to it: They started a club to teach members how to take up arms.

“It’s a way to assert our strength,” said Jake Allen, 27, who helped form the group. “Often, queer people are thought of as being weak, as being defenseless, and I think in many ways this pushes back against that. And I want white supremacists and neo-Nazis to know that queer people are taking steps necessary to protect themselves.”

Trigger Warning members meet once a month to shoot still targets and saucer-shaped pigeons. The 18 dues-paying members are all LGBTQ, many just learning about guns.

“I identified as a pacifist really through most of my life,” said McSpadden, 37, who has attended a self-defense seminar and now owns a 20-gauge shotgun.

“Is an arms race what we really want?” asked Scott Fearing, executive director of Rochester’s Out Alliance. “What we know in any arms race is that it’s never good for anybody, and death and destruction and harm and hurt can come when so many people have arms and weapons.”

death and destruction and harm and hurt are already there he’s talking about it like it’s a hypothetical possibility, not something LGBT gun clubs like trigger warning are reacting to, that are happening for real, right now.