On a July day in a suburban Pittsburgh mall food court, Kevin Edler and his wife, Lex, donned their rainbow gear and waited. Families shuffled by. Teens sipped boba. Kevin’s braid trailed from his trucker hat, emblazoned with an AK-47 over a rainbow flag with “Defend Equality” in all capital letters underneath.
The couple posted up at a central table to be seen — not just by other gun-enthusiast queer folk who would meet them there before heading to a nearby gun range social, but also by passersby. Self-defense training alone won’t keep the increasingly targeted queer community safe, they believe. The world also needs to know that they’re ready for the fight.
Their quest for empowered queer visibility is embodied in the Pink Pistols’ motto: “Armed queers don’t get bashed.”
Pink Pistols Pittsburgh formed a year ago, becoming one of 50 chapters of the national organization across the United States and Canada. The local chapter’s first year coincided with heightened tension around gender and sexual identity. Since summer, Pittsburgh’s Public Source spent time with the Pink Pistols as they practiced their sport and built a community now marking its first anniversary.
In the heat of late August, passing traffic bounced beams of light through the dark corners of the heavy metal gym Death Comes Lifting in Pittsburgh’s Allentown neighborhood. Kei, who asked to have their last name withheld for their safety, perused a table of unloaded guns laid out for Pink Pistols Pittsburgh’s “Pistol Practice in the Crypt” class.
Now training in competitive shooting, Kei’s original introduction to gun culture was through more conservative crowds. “There was a time in my life where this was no issue,” they said. “It wasn’t until maybe two years ago that I started to begin transitioning that things became a little bit more complicated.” Kei wanted to learn more, but felt less comfortable in the traditional firearms spaces they’d come to know. An encounter in which they were harassed and followed in Market Square pushed them to expand their self-defense skills.
“That is a terrifying feeling, knowing that you’re prey,” Kei said. They spent nights scrolling through Reddit, looking for a local option that could bridge their two worlds, before finding and connecting with Pink Pistols Pittsburgh. “I’m less scared now. I certainly feel more encouraged to go outside,” Kei said, smiling through dark red lipstick, curtain bangs framing their face. “Not because I’m looking to start a fight, more because I feel like I have the training and tools now to give me an edge in preventing the fight in the first place, and if necessary, winning the fight.”
The national number of reported hate crimes doubled between 2015 and 2024, even as the overall rate of violent crimes dropped across the U.S. The rising number of hate crimes butts up against a surge in anti-transgender legislation from federal and state governments, with 2024 standing as the fifth consecutive record-breaking year for the total number of anti-trans bills considered in a calendar year, according to Trans Legislation Tracker.
“I completely disagree that stricter gun control is the solution for keeping people safer right now,” said Lex, who asked to be identified only by first name because of potential personal ramifications. “I think it would be really detrimental for us to give up our firearms in a time where we are potentially at risk of losing other constitutional rights. I think the 2A [Second Amendment] exists to protect all of the other amendments in the Constitution.”
From Black Friday to targets in the basement
“If enough LGBT people start carrying and being loud and visible about it, that will make bigots and extremists and people who might be motivated to commit a hate crime think twice before they try to attack an LGBT person, essentially changing the narrative and changing the perception of LGBT people that we are weak … that we are snowflakes,” said Lex from the couple’s basement-turned-dry-firing range, where they practice target shooting and honing their reflexes without ammo. The floor around their washer and dryer is layered with cardboard to prevent dings from Russian reload drills. Magazines crashed to the floor as Kevin clicked a new one in his Kalashnikov rifle, pointed at the taped-up target of a faceless figure, tensed and dry fired again.
Kevin and Lex, who both identify as queer, got married in September 2024 after meeting three years prior at a music festival. Curious about self-defense and gun culture, they had flirted with gun ownership and signed up for a few classes, “but never made it a priority,” said Lex. Then, about two months after their wedding, Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the general election. “And so when it was Black Friday, it was time to take advantage of the sales,” said Kevin. He headed out to purchase his first handgun.
Below a strand of rainbow flags in their living room, the couple watched as Trump’s first moves in office included pardoning violent insurrectionists from the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol. “We realized that we couldn’t necessarily rely on the government to enforce laws to protect our safety when the government itself is pardoning folks who commit violent crimes, even against law enforcement officers,” said Lex. “So we felt really strongly that there was a present need for us to create a community of LGBT gun owners out here in our area, out in Western PA.”
Kevin and Lex got connected to a firearms instructor through a friend in the queer community. He taught the couple gun safety protocols and connected them to a sportsman’s club’s outdoor shooting range. Kevin began his training as an Intro to Pistol instructor through the National Rifle Association (NRA); became a range safety officer; and he and Lex got Stop the Bleed certified, a national program that teaches bystanders how to control severe bleeding in an injured person.
The couple started the Pittsburgh chapter of Pink Pistols, a nonpartisan network dedicated to the legal, safe and responsible use of firearms for self-defense centering the LGBTQIA+ community, but welcoming of anyone aligned with the cause.
Pro-gay, pro-gun and nonpartisan
The movement is gaining new members alongside expanding interest in gun ownership from minority groups. The national organization saw bumps in membership after the Orlando gay nightclub shooting and Trump’s second election, growing into the largest LGBTQ gun rights group in the country after merging in 2025 with LGBTQ firearm education program Operation Blazing Sword. The national Pink Pistols has 9,400 members on its private Facebook page.
“It’s not so much that we created Pink Pistols and then suddenly a bunch of LGBT people decided they wanted to become firearms owners,” said Lex. “There was a bunch of LGBT people who didn’t really have a space to practice firearm skills where they felt accepted and where they felt they could be fully themselves. And so when we just opened up a Pink Pistols chapter in this area, a ton of LGBT people who had already been looking for something like this came to us.”
The Pink Pistols handbook insists that the group’s politics start and end with pro-gay, pro-gun causes. “We want to maintain a big tent,” said Lex.
“I think when you hear ‘LGBT community’ and then you hear ‘firearms training,’ a lot of people instinctively think these are leftists, these are liberals. Words like socialist might even get thrown around. But that’s not part of our mission at all,” said Lex. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a liberal, conservative or something else. If you’re an American citizen, you have a right to keep and bear arms.”
A video of Lex carefully firing off a handgun at the range with a punk cut of blonde curls and flowered leggings stands in contrast to the camo-clad, bearded influencer that still stereotypically dominates the diversifying 2A space. The Pink Pistols Pittsburgh social feed promotes the chapter’s gun range community days, first aid and responsible firearms trainings, alongside Kevin’s reviews for starter guns and “Queer 2A Tea.” But even as demand for the Pink Pistols’ social media content bridges generations of allies and queer people across the political spectrum, Lex has taken down a lot of the face-forward reels she once posted to social media under the Pink Pistols Pittsburgh handle after a year of increasing political scrutiny of the LGBTQ community.
Fighting conspiracy theories with community
Federal officials said the August 2025 Annunciation Catholic Church and School shooting was carried out by a transgender woman, though the shooter’s gender identity wasn’t entirely clear. Days later, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was fatally shot while addressing a question on mass shootings and transgender people at an event at Utah Valley University. As both political parties jostled to associate the act with the other camp, investigators reported Kirk’s alleged shooter was involved in a romantic relationship with his transgender roommate. The back-to-back events fueled conspiracy theories among the right wing, including by members of the Trump administration, that trans people are predisposed to commit violence. In two press releases, Pink Pistols condemned the shootings, denounced “any such actions that are attributed to the LGBTQ community as a whole,” and reaffirmed the organization’s “purely defensive mission.”
Pro-LGBTQ organizations like GLAAD and fact checkers responded in kind, citing statistics that despite being less than 2% of the U.S. adult population, transgender people are four times as likely to be victims of crime, and were confirmed as responsible for just 0.1% of the 5,748 mass shootings in the U.S. since 2013. When the Justice Department followed the Catholic school shooting with a potential plan that would restrict transgender people from owning guns, the queer gun rights community got a boost from the NRA.
Kevin and Lex’s Pink Pistols Pittsburgh inbox lit up with people who were increasingly anxious in the swirl of escalating rhetoric, some afraid to leave their homes. People requested access to firearms training and private lessons, and the organization’s next group class sold out. “I had people that came that said they never thought about owning weapons before,” said Kevin. The chapter got another jump in interest after January’s violent ICE raids in Minneapolis, filling up classes months in advance as Kevin put out a video listing additional resources to attempt to meet demand for training. “You know it’s getting bad when the pacifists start arming themselves.”
But something else is happening in between the tourniquet twists of Stop the Bleed trainings and the metal scratch of a chamber reload. The isolation and trauma of the modern moment is unraveling into joyful connection.
“I’ve had a lot of fun since becoming a firearms owner,” said Kevin. “It’s instilled a lot of confidence in me having a sport and something to train with. But a big part, too, is the people that I’ve gotten to meet in the community we’ve built. I enjoy bringing people from all walks of life who might not be in the same room together.”
As rhetoric targeting transgender people has intensified, Lex said, there’s also been an outpouring of support from straight allies — friends, neighbors, the vendors that host their gatherings and colleagues in the Second Amendment space. “We’ve seen a lot of straight folks who just recognize that an assault to anybody’s rights is kind of an assault on all of our rights, and they’ve really rallied around us,” said Lex.
On the group’s range day in September, even members who couldn’t stay for the training dropped by beforehand to hang out. “People said, oh, we just needed to get out of the house,” said Kevin. “We don’t want people to stay inside and stay afraid,” he said. “We assure people and give them the confidence that they deserve to be seen in public. And they need to, for the sake of themselves and everyone else.”
Stephanie Strasburg is a photojournalist with Pittsburgh’s Public Source who can be reached at stephanie@publicsource.org, on Instagram @stephaniestrasburg or on Twitter @stephstrasburg.
This story has been fact-checked by Rich Lord.
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