AP Photo/Elise Amendola

With it being Pride Month, there’s a lot of attention on the LGBT community. This has, undoubtedly, annoyed some people. Among those are probably folks who consider themselves to be pro-Second Amendment.

However, a recent story in the New York Post points out that the pro-2A crowd should make a very concerted effort to reach out to the LGBT community. After all, it seems a lot of them are buying guns, and they’re not taking up deer hunting.

“I DON’T want to get beaten to death, stabbed and burnt alive,” a slight woman with long blond hair and a checked shirt says. “I want a gun to feel equal.”

She is a member of one of the United States’ fastest growing gun clubs, the jauntily named Pink Pistols.

Two years after the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, gay, lesbian and transgender Americans are nervous. According to the Human Rights Centre (HRC), a US LGBTI advocacy group, 52 gay people were murdered in the US last year, because of their sexuality, and 28 transgender people met the same fate.

In increasing numbers, they are fighting back by taking up arms.

Regardless of your opinion on homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality, or anything else, everyone has a right to live. People have a right to exist, whether you agree with what they do with that existence or not.

And a growing number are buying guns and learning to defend themselves.

Yet a large group of those people don’t seem to feel particularly welcome in the gun community as a whole. Based on some of what I see, I can’t blame them.

“Says the man who came up with Gun Pride Month,” someone might quip, and that’s fair.

However, nothing about my Gun Pride proposal was intended to denigrate or antagonize the LGBT community, especially the pro-gun portion of it. I’ve had some discussions with members of that community, and there are things I probably could have done better on that, but I’ve also made it clear that I’m not mocking them or anything of the sort.

Anyone willing to defend the Second Amendment needs to be held close as an ally. I don’t care about anything beyond that. I may find disagreement on other issues, sure, but that’s trivial when it comes to the gun debate.

And there’s a reason the LGBT community is arming up. Simply put, armed gays don’t get bashed.

If those numbers above are right, that there’s one murder per week because of someone’s sexuality, then that’s one person per week too many. It’s high time we take special pains to reach out to folks some may not have considered. If they’re buying guns to defend themselves, they’re buying them for the same reason a lot of us are. They just have slightly different threats. More accurately, they have all the same threats, plus a bit more.

Two years ago, following the Pulse shooting, Operation Blazing Sword kicked off. A ton of people volunteered to help the LGBT community not just purchase a firearm, but learn how to use it. I’m one of those volunteers.

However, what have we done beyond that? Not a whole lot, and I think we need to change that. They’re our allies in this fight. We need to start acting like it.