Victory for Pink Pistols in DC

[Subdeacon Joe]

http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/05/pro-gun-gay-group-wins-major-victory-armed-queers-dont-get-bashed/

 

The group, which advocates for gay Americans to carry firearms, just won a major victory on Tuesday: a federal judge in Washington halted enforcement of a portion of the city’s strict gun law, ordering Washington DC police to stop requiring residents to demonstrate they have “a good reason to fear injury,” which he ruled places “an unconstitutional burden” on citizens’ right to bear arms.

The Pink Pistols challenged the city’s requirement that a person who wants to carry a concealed handgun outside the home show he or she has a “good reason to fear injury to his or her person or property” or another “proper reason” for carrying the weapon.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon characterized the city’s law as an “understandable, but overly zealous, desire to restrict the right to carry in public a firearm for self-defense to the smallest possible number of law-abiding, responsible” citizens.

Charles Cooper, an attorney representing the shooting group, said Tuesday he was “really gratified” by the ruling.

On their website, The Pink Pistols write:

Armed queers don’t get bashed. We change the public perception of the sexual minorities, such that those who have in the past perceived them as safe targets for violence and hateful acts — beatings, assaults, rapes, murders — will realize that that now, a segment of the sexual minority population is now armed and effective with those arms. Those arms are also concealed, so they do not know which ones are safe to attack, and which are not…which they can harm as they have in the past, and which may draw a weapon and fight back.

Speaking to US News, Pink Pistols leader Gwen Patton explains her philosophy: “It’s been almost an automatic assumption that gay people won’t fight back, that they’re passive, they’re weak. We’re putting it out there that you don’t know which of the gay people out there are armed. … Don’t attack gay people because that could be a really bad decision.”

As it says on the website’s FAQ: “The Pink Pistols are the ones who have decided to no longer be safe targets. They have teeth. They will use them.”