It's not just macho Bible thumpers who treasure their Second Amendment rights.
By Marin Cogan - 8/6/2014
Four years ago, Chris Cheng's Chinese-Japanese-Cuban-American Google employee' started watching Top Shot, a History Channel reality show where contestants shoot their way through a series of complex competitions. Cheng, who as a kid had sometimes gone shooting with his Navy veteran father, started getting into the show.
One day, while watching season two with some of his Google coworkers, Cheng told them: "Hey, everyone, this is gonna sound crazy, but I think I'm going to apply for Top Shot." He remembers his colleagues thinking he was nuts. "They looked at me like, 'You barely shoot, you don't have any accolades or trophies or awards or anything in the shooting world. What makes you think you'd even stand a chance with some of these lifelong, seasoned professional marksmen?' "
But Cheng had a sense of what he could do. He'd been going to the range and hitting his marks; the best way to put his skills to the test, he figured, was to sign up and try out. He got in. Then he beat out veterans, police officers, and an Olympic shooter en route to winning that season's competition. The first thing he did after his victory was take some of the $100,000 prize money and upgrade his National Rifle Association membership to lifetime status.
Then, last year, Cheng took to his blog to announce he was gay. This wasn't a surprise to his friends and family: Cheng and his boyfriend had been together for four and a half years. But he wanted people to see that gun owners were a diverse set of people' and who better than a gay, racially diverse, tech-geek-turned-champion-marksman to deliver the message?
In April, Cheng officially signed on as a news commentator for the NRA. This past month, the group released its first video starring Cheng, in which he offers an explainer on the fighting in Ukraine before launching into a case for protecting gun owners from government intrusion. "I think that this is an opportunity for the NRA and our community to accurately portray the diversity that already exists in the community," Cheng told me, of his new gig. "We've allowed some prevailing stereotypes to take hold, and we're not challenging them."
Cheng might be the most prominent gay marksman at the moment, but he's not alone. Websites and communities tailored to gay gun enthusiasts include the Pink Pistols, Big Gay Al's Big Gay (Gun) Blog, and GaysWithGuns.net, which features a sexy, stubbled man brandishing a semiautomatic. The website used to pose the provocative question of what would have happened to Matthew Shepard had he been trained to use a gun though that was removed after too many people objected, and it was replaced with a quote from the Dalai Lama: "If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun." Self-defense was one of the reasons Marc Whittemore, a Los Angeles-based designer, started the website, but it was also partly to show that "it's not just Christian, redneck, Bible-thumping old white men that are pro-gun."
The Pink Pistols are probably the most prominent group of gay gun enthusiasts. The organization began 14 years ago, when Jonathan Rauch (a contributing editor at National Journal) wrote an article for Salon arguing that gay people should receive firearms training and arm themselves so they could defend against hate crimes. Not only would they be protecting themselves from violence, he wrote, but they could change the way both straight and gay people viewed them: Guns, Rauch argued, could "emancipate them from their image often internalized of cringing weakness. Pink pistols, I'll warrant, would do far more for the self-esteem of the next generation of gay men and women than any number of hate-crime laws or anti-discrimination statutes."
One libertarian activist in Boston, Doug Krick, took inspiration from Rauch's piece. Soon he and his friends were forming a group to go to the shooting range together. Their organization the Pink Pistols got a lot of media coverage, and before long, others from around the country were calling to start chapters in their states.
"We teach the public that we know how to do this, and you don't know what gay person out there might be a Pink Pistol and might be able to defend themselves," says Gwen Patton, who speaks for the national organization. "Rather than saying, 'We're here, we're queer, we're in your face,' our thing is, 'We're queer, yeah, that's fine, look at the ways we're similar rather than that one way we're different. But if you absolutely can't bring yourself to do that, we're going to ask you very forcefully not to try to harm us.' "
Over time, Patton says the group became something more than just a self-defense organization: It was a way for like-minded friends to feel comfortable at the shooting range. "It's great, wacky fun," says Rauch of the movement he inspired. "My hope would be they're important out of proportion to their numbers because they say something and are uniquely qualified to say something, which is the minority case for self-defense."
No comments:
Post a Comment