Leftist and liberal gun groups are seeing a rush of new members

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — Several niche, left-leaning gun advocacy groups said that since the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, they can hardly keep up with the surging demand for firearms training.

With President Donald Trump sending armed federal agents into communities around the country, even more once gun-shy liberals and leftists are considering getting armed. And while Americans tend to think of gun owners as leaning more Republican and male, already more women, gay people and people of color have taken up arms in recent years, particularly after 2020.

Weekend classes at L.A. Progressive Shooters are sold out through March. Registrations for permit-to-carry courses at Pink Pistols Twin Cities, which serves LGBTQ people in Minneapolis and St. Paul, are up from an average of five people per class to 25 — the group recently added seven more courses to accommodate increased interest, and those are filling up, too. To paraphrase a recent meme: The right is arguing for gun control, and the left is buying guns.

“In the past couple of days, there has been a shift,” Lara Smith, national spokesperson for the Liberal Gun Club, says. “This changed views on the left.”

Alex Pretti, a beloved ICU nurse who cared for ailing veterans and an outdoorsman who was concerned about the environment, was also, like one-third of Americans, a gun owner. He was carrying his lawfully owned weapon in a holster before federal agents disarmed him and then fatally shot him.

Jordan Levine, founder of the inclusive gun community A Better Way 2A, says his organization has seen an influx of gun groups and instructors asking to join its resource page in the last few weeks — Ready Rainbow in Chicago, Grassroots Defense in Iowa and Solidarity Defense in Sacramento are a few recent additions. “People are scared and angry and want to equalize the power imbalance that we’re seeing on the news, where you’ve got ICE steamrolling people with no recourse,” he adds.

Philip Smith, founder and president of the National African American Gun Association, says membership in his organization has grown since Trump’s second term began and since Pretti was killed. “People join when they’re scared,” Smith says. “People join when certain people get in office, because it scares them. People join when they see these shootings across the country, and it seems like it’s just madness starting to grow more and more.”

Fear and politics are big motivators for gun sales. Gun purchases go up after mass shootings and domestic terror attacks, or when people sense that legislative gun restrictions are on the horizon, as when a Democrat is elected president. The reverse tends to be true when a Republican is president, says Matt Lacombe, a political scientist who studies gun culture and who is the author of “Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force” — gun sales went down after Trump was first elected in 2016, and they’ve largely stayed down in his second term (the gun industry calls it the “Trump Slump”). But Lacombe says that national data could be obscuring smaller trends that are underway in parts of the country.

“It doesn’t seem to be the case anymore that buying guns and carrying guns in response to perceived threats is a solely conservative thing,” he adds.

As the Trump administration continues to wage an immigration crackdown in US cities, people are showing up to anti-ICE protests and neighborhood watch patrols armed, and some gun groups are encouraging people to become armed observers. In one video on X, two armed men could be seen at the back of a vigil for Pretti in Minneapolis last weekend. Speaking to independent journalist Talia Jane, one of them invoked the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and said, “Force is not going to be stopped by a lack of force, unfortunately. And I want to see everybody else around us that’s on our same side, I wanna see them get armed as well. So right now we’re here primarily to keep everybody safe but also to serve as an example that everybody around us can do this too.”

In another video circulating on social media, an armed man can be seen standing guard outside his neighborhood in St. Paul. “This is my block,” he tells the interviewer. “This is my area. I don’t go into other people’s neighborhoods and try to intimidate them. I protect my people.”

“This is the thing that gun owners have been talking about forever: the ‘tyrannical government,’” Levine says. But the people who usually warn about the dangers of government tyranny, as he sees it, are “somehow taking the side of the tyrannical government.”

The administration’s assertions that Pretti was in the wrong for carrying a gun have also turned off some Trump supporters. The White House, for its part, referred to recent remarks from press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “While Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, Americans do not have a constitutional right to impede lawful immigration enforcement operations,” Leavitt said on January 26. “Any gun owner knows that when you are carrying a weapon, when you are bearing arms and you are confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the assumption of risk and the risk of force being used against you.”

Maj Toure, founder of Black Guns Matter and a self-identified libertarian who voted for Trump in the last two elections, says he’s never considered Trump to be a strong defender of the Second Amendment, citing the bump stock ban during the president’s first term (later struck down by the Supreme Court), as well as Trump’s remarks in 2018 that guns should be confiscated from dangerous people even if it violates due process rights. The comments about Pretti, Toure says, are just “par for the course.”

“Now this administration is blatantly saying it: If you are in opposition to our political aims and you are armed, we will view you as a criminal,” he says, adding that this “1,000% is going to impact how I vote.”

Some onlookers also drew comparisons to another gun owner killed by law enforcement in Minnesota: In 2016, Philando Castile was killed by a police officer who opened fire on him during a traffic stop after Castile informed him that he had a firearm in his vehicle. The NRA initially stayed silent on the killing — after intense pressure from its Black members, it issued a vague statement that didn’t mention Castile by name.

The Trump administration’s rhetoric on Pretti is merely the latest example of its inconsistent stance on gun control, notes Patrick Eddington, senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute. This past fall, there were reports that the Justice Department was considering proposals to ban trans people from purchasing guns. And just last week, the Washington Post reported that the DOJ is planning to change the firearm purchase form to require applicants to list their biological sex at birth, raising further alarm among trans rights advocates. “When you start telling one group of people they can’t have guns, who’s going to be the next group?” Eddington says.

Conservatives’ selective support for gun rights has historic precedent. In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party began “copwatching,” observing police interactions with community members in Oakland while visibly carrying guns — a practice that bears some similarities to today’s ICE watch patrols. In response, Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, enacted the Mulford Act, which repealed a law that allowed people to carry loaded firearms in public. The NRA also supported the law at the time.

“The standards that seem to apply to gun carriers, gun owners who are Black or who are more broadly on the left seem to be different than the standards applied to gun owners on the right,” Lacombe says.

In a Truth Social post early Friday morning, Trump called Pretti an “agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist.” Gun owners across the spectrum aren’t buying it.

“He’s a gun guy. He’s a guy who carries. He trains,” Lara Smith, from the Liberal Gun Club, says. “And when I say one of us, I mean one of the gun community.”

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