On the left

N.Y. gays among activists arming selves vs. hate

ROCHESTER — The former pacifist pumped a shotgun at the firing line.

Lore McSpadden never touched a gun before the Trigger Warning Queer & Trans Gun Club started this past year. Now McSpadden is among the shooters routinely yelling, “Pull!” and blasting at clay pigeons angling over a mowed field near Rochester.

Trigger Warning members are anxious about armed and organized extremists who seem increasingly emboldened. Their response has a touch of symmetry to it: They started a club to teach members how to take up arms.

“It’s a way to assert our strength,” said Jake Allen, 27, who helped form the group. “Often, queer people are thought of as being weak, as being defenseless, and I think in many ways this pushes back against that. And I want white supremacists and neo-Nazis to know that queer people are taking steps necessary to protect themselves.”

The 18 dues-paying Trigger Warning members are all LGBT, many just learning about guns.

And the group is not alone. Allen said there is another Trigger Warning chapter in Atlanta and he has received inquiries from people in about 10 other cities.

Membership in the Pittsburgh chapter of the Pink Pistols, an LGBT-oriented gun group with chapters nationwide, bumped up after the presidential election and then after a white supremacist killed a counterprotester in Charlottesville, Va., this summer.

The National African-American Gun Association gained 500 new members within two days after Charlottesville. Association president Philip Smith said the group went from four chapters to 45 in the past year. The Liberal Gun Club, a national organization, has seen its paid membership roughly double since the election to about 5,500, said Lara Smith of the group’s California chapter.

Leftists see the country differently now than in the days of Occupy Wall Street six years ago, said Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.” Trump’s victory emboldened white supremacists, he said, and the threat is felt not just by the LGBT community, but people of color, immigrants, Jews and Muslims.

“Back then we were sitting in parks, twinkling our fingers and talking about economic inequality,” he said. “Now we’re talking about firearms and self-defense.”