What’s a Gun-Loving Liberal to Do?

Bryan Schatz has an
interesting article in the Pacific
Standard about liberal gun owners, discussing how they
get by in a world where one set of peers disagrees with them about
weapons while another set disagrees about virtually everything
else. Here’s the opening:

Sara Robinson of Seattle, Washington, is chatty,
affable, and obviously liberal. For years the former writer for
Alternet has been a member of a tight-knit community of activists
who write and organize around progressive causes. Or at least she
was a member, until her “tribe,” as she calls it, effectively
banished her in the wake of the December 2012 Sandy Hook school
shooting. “I was forced out,” she says.

Robinson, a registered Democrat since the Reagan era, is also a
life-long gun owner. And almost as soon as news of the massacre
broke, her relationship with her left-leaning circle began to fall
apart over the issue of firearms.

As she and her peers discussed the tragedy—with Robinson speaking
as a reform-minded but unapologetic gun owner—email correspondence
with her peers quickly devolved. Friends told her they would never
allow their children into her home knowing guns were in the
house—no matter how responsibly they were stored. Within weeks, she
was pushed out of an online list of “tightly bonded peers” she had
co-founded herself.

As the story progresses, we learn that gun-loving liberalism
isn’t that lonely a position. According to Gallup, there
are around 16 million liberal gun owners in the U.S. They don’t
always feel comfortable in the NRA, but some of them have founded
groups of their own:

Many left-leaning gun owners are finding a home in
alternative groups like the Blue Steel Democrats—the official state
gun caucuses of the Democratic party—and the Liberal Gun Club, an
online forum and meet-up group for people who share an interest in
guns and also respect each other’s political beliefs. (Despite the
group’s moniker, politics vary widely among members.) It’s a sort
of Universalist Church of Gun Owners, where all are
welcome.

Some people, Schatz reports, own guns for reasons directly
related to their left-wing commitments. For example:

I spoke to Marlene Hoeber, a transgender machinist
living in West Oakland—not far from the original seat of the Black
Panthers—who started her gun collection with a modern replica of a
19th-century black-powder revolver and is now “swimming” in
firearms. She views her gun ownership as a political act….

[S]he owns firearms in part because she is not sure she can count
on—or trust—the police. As a trans person, she knows that hate
crimes happen, that some people would wish to do her harm, and that
it might be up to her to protect herself.

Just a few years ago, it seemed like most of the radicals I knew
who cared about gun control were opposed to it, because they
associated it with racism and repression; the liberals, meanwhile,
had backed off the issue, because they thought it had cost Al Gore
the election. It’s striking how quickly the landscape of a debate
can change.

Bonus link: If the Liberal Gun Club is too squishy
for you, try the Gay Communist
Gun Club.