It’s a Tuesday night, and I find myself in a carpeted classroom situated in a brick strip mall in Lincolnwood, IL.
The room is filled with desks, a white board, and a projector, positioned below a wooden balcony. The space is painfully American-suburban and reminds me of a portable classroom I entered once to attend a Southern Baptist youth group meeting of one of my middle school friends. The classroom walls are plastered with decor, but not with maps of the 50 states or cursive alphabets. Instead, a “Join or Die” sign, Betsy Ross’s 13-states American flag, a huge banner with the words “Team GLOCK” (trademarked), a blackjack with “1776” and a pirate skull placed between the numbers, and fake color-pencil drawings of Chuck Norris, Boba Fett, James Bond, and of course—lots of guns, cover the main walls.
It’s a Tuesday night, and I have found myself in an “Intro to Firearms Safety & Illinois Law” class. Yet, despite the room’s intimidating appearance, the vibe in the space is calm, light, even fun. The class is hosted by Pink Pistols Chicago, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a space for non-traditional gun owners and making objective knowledge about firearms accessible.
The class is not a shooting practice, but strictly an introduction lecture to the basics of firearms and how to use them safely. In fact, only about a third of the people in the class have Firearm Owner’s Identification (FOID) cards. Our instructor, Raye (they/them), is a certified Illinois Concealed Carry License (CCL) instructor, and the founder and chapter president of Pink Pistols Chicago (PPC). Raye wears a red PPC shirt and khakis. Their head is shaved on one side, with curly hair on the other side-dyed blue, purple, and pink. The frames of their eyeglasses are rainbow-colored. They start the class by asking how everyone heard about it.
One person at the very front of the room says: “I just searched like, ‘queer gun class’ on the Internet.”
Raye responds wittily, “Our SEO is really good then…Does it just show a picture of me?”
The class emphasizes a cultural shift; a veering into the other lane of the firearms debate. A decade ago, liberals were extremely anti-gun. Today, however, there is a rising desire in leftist communities to embrace the Second Amendment that was once heavily lobbied against. If you can’t beat them, join them?
A study published by the National Library of Medicine attempted to analyze changes in outlooks on firearm ownership after the 2024 United States presidential election. Their findings stated that “Higher levels of perceived threat to US democracy were associated with greater increases in urges to carry firearms”, and that “Individuals threatened by Trump administration policies”—ICE raids, attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, threats to basic reproductive and sexual healthcare—“appear to be experiencing urges to acquire firearms, carry them, and store them readily accessible.”
“I would say that I have led most of my life being pretty anti-gun,” Gracey, a 31-year-old FOID card holder with long red braids and a septum piercing told me, “I think I identified as a pacifist for a long time, back in high school. I think that started to change in 2020.
“That was the first time that I was like, ‘Is there going to be like a civil war or something? Or is there going to be a situation in which, maybe it would be best for me to have a firearm?’” Gracey (she/they) feels strongly about the need to protect her community and those more endangered than herself. “It is not the oppressed’s job to do something about it. It is the job of the people who have the privilege to do something about it,” she said.
Gracey’s sister was also anti-gun until last year. However, once Trump returned to office, and ICE raids began popping up across the country, Gracey and their sister began doomsday prepping—50-gallon water jugs, food, maps, lighters, etc.
“I think that as she sat with the possibility of there being a situation where we will need to use the food to be rationed and the water that we’ve saved, the next step would be protection,” Gracey said.
In terms of firearm ownership, Gracey and her sister aren’t in any sort of rush right at the moment.
“We want one that we would literally only use if like America was collapsing. Like an emergency, emergency, emergency sort of situation,” they said.
They are interested in taking classes with Pink Pistols Chicago, and have received shooting lessons from their grandfather and his friend who is a former police officer. Gracey thinks it is important for leftists to “take a page out of their book” in regard to conservatives’ stance on guns and the Second Amendment, in order to use that knowledge to our advantage.
“When I think of organizing, which is so important, I feel like there are different roles in the revolution, you know? Not everybody is up for the violence aspect. Some people are going to provide food, some people are going to shelter people if they need, and I think a lot of my desire to go the ‘gun route’ is honestly a limitation of my imagination of ‘What would my role in the revolution be?’ I don’t necessarily know what skills I could provide to people, but this is a tangible thing that I could teach. That I could learn, gain the skill, become comfortable with, and then this could be a way that I could support in a revolution. Even though I’m scared.”
The NIL study’s conclusions also acknowledged that the “community-level decision making,” to own firearms, influenced by the country’s current political climate, “while motivated by the drive for protection, increases the risk for harm.” Raye similarly emphasized the risk for harm in firearm ownership throughout their 2-hour long lecture. Raye explained to us that firearms are used in over half of the suicides in the United States. Access to lethal means increases risk substantially. Raye asked us to consider before deciding to own a firearm, ‘1) Where will I keep it? 2) Who else will have access to it? 3) Do I have enough time to practice and learn? 4) Can I accept the consequences of using it? 5) Will it make me safer?’
Raye told me after class, “My biggest fear is that queer people will go out and buy a bunch of guns, throw them in a bedside table, not know how to use them, and hurt themselves.”
Raye is steadfast in the claim that they aren’t trying to convince anyone to own a gun, saying they are responsible for talking more people out of gun ownership than into it. They stated that they carry pepper-spray on them (a non-lethal alternative to a firearm) “100% of the time,” compared to the 1-2% of the time they claim they carry their guns. “Guns are not a make-me-safe machine,” they said.
“Guns are not a make-me-safe machine,” they said.
Their lecture is littered with movie and television quotes relating to firearms—among them Die Hard, Wayne’s World, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Their PowerPoint presentation is extremely thorough, and I’m surprised by the type of ethical and moral ground we are covering: signs for concern regarding mental health of gun owners, non-lethal self-defense alternatives to firearms, universal safety rules, firearm choice consideration, gun range etiquette, emergency first aid, Illinois red flag laws, ordinary vs deadly force, and more.
According to Illinois Firearm Restraining Order (FRO) Law (also known as “red flag laws”), individuals eligible to file an FRO include blood relatives, partners, spouses, former spouses, persons who have a child in common, and members who share a household. An FRO is a civil order designed to temporarily remove firearms from individuals who are potentially dangerous to themselves or others.
While important in theory, Raye explained that red flag laws can be abused by relatives on behalf of your identity. Imagine you are a trans person who has a FOID card and owns a firearm legally. Maybe you are in a gun club that meets twice a month at a shooting range for fun. If you have an estranged family member who is disapproving of your gender identity, no matter how alienated they are from your current lifestyle, they can petition for a civil order, claiming mental instability regarding your gender expression, and possibly successfully win their case, removing firearms from your possession. FROs are just one example of barriers that make it harder for marginalized groups—LGBTQ+, disabled, poor—to own firearms.
About 10 minutes into the class, an older white gentleman walks in with a few bags slung over his shoulder. He stands in the doorway for a few moments, smiling.
“Is my group at the other location?” he asks.
“They probably are,” Raye replies casually with a laugh, looking around the room at the majority queer/femme presenting students. The other location in question is a shooting range a few doors down from this classroom. As I approached the strip mall, I saw the black and grey American flags and the overwhelming presence of men dressed in, ironically enough, khakis, which immediately made my heart rate spike.
The inclination to own guns and learn how to use them for this rising community of left-leaning firearm enthusiasts is an extension and exasperation of self-defense culture. The government makes people feel powerless, and state sanctioned violence makes people want to protect their communities and fight back. Firearm ownership for these groups is like any other form of self-defense—a reflex to protect one’s self from an entity.
Thinking about it this way, there doesn’t seem to be anything silly or unrealistic about arming one’s self against the powers that be. That entity may shape-shift, but it is still the same entity. One night it may appear as a man following you home, or the driver of a nondescript SUV tailing your immigrant neighbors. Or perhaps it manifests in the highest seat of American government, as a narcissistic, drunk-off-power abuser, who like Houdini manages to escape every attempt of facing accountability.
The people America picks for its national representatives are very often the very same people we try to defend ourselves from in our everyday lives. This violent patriarchal nature manifested a desperate need for self-defense culture to emerge in various forms. And now, in its most recent and intense iteration, all bets are off.