The Hard-Left Shooters Leading a Gun Culture Revolution

This isn’t the story I set out to write.

I was going to talk about a pretty feel-good firearms competition I went to earlier this year, where trans and queer people made up about a quarter of participants and the unofficial rule was you’re not allowed to be a bigot. I was going to describe the strange and whimsical mix of subcultures people embraced there—like polyamory and Mad Max cosplay—wrapped up in pro-LGBT and Black Lives Matter patches.

Then Charlie Kirk was killed.

Suddenly I found myself wondering if I should write this story at all. If doing so would put my sources—gun-loving trans people in Trump’s America—in danger. I’m still going to talk about the things I just mentioned. But this story, even as I write, continues to get darker.

It’s late July, and I’m riding bitch in a pseudo golf cart at a gun range in the not-quite-desert that is Parma, Idaho, listening to two competitive shooters jokingly bicker over which one of them is more marginalized. One, a 22-year-old YouTuber who goes by Gun Bunny, is a Russian Jew who is poly-pansexual and has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a disability that makes her joints hurt, along with autism and ADHD. The other, our driver, is an Indigenous-Mexican Slovak Jew who is trans and chronically disabled. As we grind to a halt, dust from the dirt road blowing around us, Gun Bunny declares the other shooter a winner. “You have Slovak Jew, so you do have me beat,” she says, to which our driver replies, “even the Russians screwed us.” Laughing, Gun Bunny offers a truce and a mission for them both. “So what you’re saying is we should team up to defeat Nazis.”

Quip notwithstanding, the vibes at the High Desert Brutality match are closer to Burning Man than paramilitary. The shooting competition combines marksmanship with tasks like throwing 58-pound kettle bells down a field, lugging heavy jugs, running around in trenches, and hitting targets from a fast-moving postapocalyptic sand buggy, all under the beating hot sun. There’s also a leftist theme (“a workers’ rights uprising on Mars”), cosplay—Gun Bunny is dressed in a Dune-inspired grey stillsuit made from workout clothes and faux leather—and elaborate set design. It’s one of the most intense shooting competitions I’ve been to and also one of the most queer-friendly events I’ve attended all year. Almost all of the 135 participants have traveled a long way.

While America has no dearth of shooting contests, there are only a handful of Brutality matches a year, and again and again I hear there’s nothing else like them. A big part of that is the effort that goes into staging and the difficulty of the challenges. But a much bigger part is that minorities aren’t made to feel like outsiders. “We will welcome with open arms anyone that isn't hateful,” says event organizer Karl Kasarda, a 6-foot-tall firearms content creator on YouTube—aka a “guntuber”—with a salt-and-pepper undercut that flops to the right on top.

Kasarda is dressed in a sandy acid-wash T-shirt and tartan cargo pants—“postapocalyptic cowboy meets dad,” Gun Bunny chimes in. A 51-year-old cis white man whose love of subcultures spans hacking, industrial music, and a stint as a minister with the Satanic Temple, Kasarda eschews the title of “leader.” On the contrary, he says he has “a problem with authority” and “flirts” with the idea of anarchy. But there is no question he is largely responsible for building this alternative gun community, which he and others describe as the “punk rock outsiders of the shooting community.”

His movement started about a decade ago with a YouTube channel, InRange TV, which now has around 930,000 followers. Kasarda’s videos frequently focus on firearms history he believes many conservatives in the gun world would love to forget, like slave revolts, members of a Native American tribe kicking the KKK’s ass in a standoff in North Carolina in 1958, and a possibly trans midwife in Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s cavalry. The channel’s description says it’s “actively anti-racist, pro human liberation and LGBTQ+ rights,” and Kasarda is a champion of “2A For All,” the belief that everyone, particularly minorities, should have access to arms. While that might seem like a natural stance for any gun-loving American, Kasarda’s views have pissed off right-wing gun nuts so badly that there are years-long angry threads about him on AR15.com and Kiwi Farms, a forum notorious for harassing trans folks. “We don’t want to talk about marginalized communities depending on firearms because we don’t like the marginalized communities,” Kasarda says, of how right-wingers see the issue.

These tensions have gotten worse under Trump 2.0. After the president was reelected, left-leaning and queer-focused firearms organizations and classes like the Liberal Gun Club and the Pink Pistols told me they were seeing major spikes in interest and attendance. In early September, media outlets reported that Justice Department officials were considering a gun ban for trans people. In response, one trans gun content creator recommended trans Americans who’d been planning to purchase firearms “do so now.”

Seconds before he was shot to death, Charlie Kirk shared a myth about trans people propagating mass shootings. An attendee at one of his Turning Point USA events asked him, “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” to which Kirk replied, “Too many.” Numbers from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive find that there have been five confirmed trans or nonbinary mass shooters between January 2013 and September 2025, making trans people responsible for less than 0.1 percent of the 5,748 mass shootings the group tracked in that time period.

Neither that data, nor the fact that the suspect in Kirk’s killing is not trans, has stopped the right from using his death to further its crusade against transgender Americans. Bolstered by an early Wall Street Journal report, which cited an inaccurate federal memo saying authorities suspected there was “transgender and anti-fascist ideology” carved into some of the bullet casings at the scene, prominent Republicans have said trans people should be locked in mental institutions or not be allowed to use the internet. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, a policy blueprint for the Trump administration, is now calling for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to create a “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” category for domestic terrorism.

As with many pro-gun Americans—and I’ve talked to lots on the left and right—plenty of Brutality match attendees are concerned with self-defense. “People see a threat, they're scared,” says Jane Bird, a soft-spoken trans educator in her late thirties. We’re chatting inside the clubhouse at the Parma Rod and Gun Club as the shooters prepare for the day. It’s a basic shack, equipped with a bathroom and water and swarming with an ungodly number of flies. So is the rest of the range—apparently a result of a local farm’s recent fertilizer deployment. Bird is resting before her plan to compete tomorrow in the Roaring 20s division, where she’ll be cosplaying as Corporal Betsy, a lesbian character in Fallout: New Vegas. (Other divisions, like Cyberpunk and Space Cowboy, determine what styles of guns people can use—modern or historic.)

Bird lives in Iowa, a state that recently removed gender identity as a protected class from its Civil Rights Act. She doesn’t want her real name used here because, as someone who works with kids, she believes it would “be very, very, very easy to end up on the LibsofTikTok or Tucker Carlson.” In recent months, Bird and a handful of other progressive shooters have been hosting free self-defense 101 classes for marginalized people. Sometimes, that just means helping people realize that firearms aren’t suited for them. “There’s almost a stereotype, an in-group stereotype, that if you want to learn about guns, ask your spicy trans girlfriends,” she says. “I'm now, I guess, one of those.”

She’s a good shot. She should be—growing up in Wisconsin, her dad, a competitive shooter since the ’70s, was “buying guns for me before I was born,” she says. Both the rifle and handgun she’s using this weekend were his. She took a break from them in her twenties, due to the mental toll of being closeted. “I didn’t want to be around anything that made self-harm easy,” she says. The decision to come out also alienated her from certain family members, including her grandfather, who refused to call her by her name.

After she started getting back into shooting around 2019, she came across InRange TV through some friends at a since-defunct Iowa chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association. Her first reaction to a Brutality match was, “I could never do that.” Now, she’s not only doing it, she’s part of InRange’s staff, in charge of making their logos and designs. She shows me one of her patches—a mama possum carrying armed babies on her back; her water bottles are decked out in stickered slogans like “Protect Trans Youth.”

Bird has been to two Brutality matches this year. (For non-staff, the competition fee is $300 to $400.) She contrasts the vibe at those events with that of a local shooting club. “The last time I tried to show up, there were two other women there, and when the second arrived, the first one said to her, ‘I'm glad there's another real woman here for a change,’” Bird says. “I just decided it’s really not worth it trying to go to those anymore.”

Even before Kirk’s death, right-wing personalities like Andy Ngo were sharing images of trans people taking up arms on social media, implying they present a threat. Following the arrest of Kirk shooting suspect Tyler Robinson, that paranoia reached a fever pitch, with many ostensible supporters of the Second Amendment suggesting trans people be stripped of their arms. “How much do you want to bet we are going to find out there is a Trans terror cell that groomed Tyler Robinson and possibly even provided him with the gun to kill Charlie?” asked MAGA influencer Laura Loomer on X on September 13, following up with a slur. “There are literally shooting clubs now where Trannies meet up to learn how to shoot rifles and they wear shirts that say ‘Kill fascists’ and ‘the 2nd Amendment is for shooting cops.’ They are training for war. It’s very dangerous.”

Reader, they are not training for war. Certainly not at this event.

I follow Ollam onto a platform about 20 feet up a watch tower to start his challenge—long-distance shooting to take down colonial attack ships on this fantasy version of Mars. But 30 seconds after he pops off a few shots with his rifle, people start shouting “Fire!” They don’t mean gunfire. Ollam’s shots spark a grass fire in the dry, 90-degree heat. It’s spreading fast and wide—huge plumes of smoke blowing into the air—and we all make our way closer to the range’s parking lot as we wait for emergency crews to arrive.

With my reporting plan literally up in flames, I decide to meet with Tacticool Girlfriend, one of the few prominent trans guntubers, at her hotel room in nearby Nampa. Earlier in the day, before the event came to a sudden halt, I watched her shoot targets out of an abandoned school bus with an AR-15, later placing third at that stage. I was impressed by her speed and marksmanship. In the poorly lit room, which she’s sharing with two fellow trans women shooters, her content-creation prowess comes to life. She knows her angles, and that’s harder with a bulky AR-15 involved. She is striking. Her thick, black eyebrows and pronounced cheekbones make her stand out in a crowd, even when her mouth is covered by her keffiyeh, which she wears to hide her identity.

Unlike some of the others, Tacticool Girlfriend, who is also a “straight-up” anarchist, says she’s never felt unwelcome at any shooting events. Her friend, whom I’ll call Nancy (they both ask that I not use their real names), even jokes that they love coming to small towns because people generally don’t “clock” them as trans. But they did get some looks at a gun store, Nancy adds, so they tried to fit in. “As soon as we started talking shit about Gavin Newsom, they got real friendly,” Nancy says. “It’s annoying, because it’s like, yeah, like, you hate liberals and I hate liberals, but not for the same reason.”

Tacticool Girlfriend’s interest in firearms stems from being a history buff doing Soviet Red Army reenactments, but leading up to Trump’s 2016 win, she started training in earnest, with modern guns. “I just kind of saw the writing on the walls, like where America was going,” she says. She’s also been the target of threats and paranoid accusations. While she carries at all times, to be prepared for a worst-case scenario, she says she knows it doesn't guarantee her safety—and she's not seeking confrontation. “People give us way more credit than we actually deserve,” she says. “We're just dressing up in our little costumes and shooting guns for fun.”

At a backyard gathering of Brutality match shooters later that evening, Kasarda tells me about his YouTube interview, in January 2021, with Tacticool Girlfriend. At the time, he’d noticed her YouTube channel, which now has almost 67,000 subscribers, and wanted to signal-boost her. They talked about shooting matches and “stuff we liked.” They didn’t talk about trans issues, or even the fact that she is trans. Still, everyone lost their shit, Kasarda says. “What that boiled down to was a realization that I don't think there was a way to fix the old gun community,” he says. There were people he had to ask to leave the InRange community. But he also lost half of his Patreon income and “most” industry contacts. (He doesn’t accept sponsors because he feels they’re a “corrupting influence.”) “We've had to really build our own path forward,” Kasarda says.

Kasarda’s ability to rally people almost has me feeling a sense of kumbaya about the community he’s helped create. One that is about to be tested again.

In the weeks following Kirk’s killing, everything ramps up. I watch the conservative rage machine deploy against trans people. There’s a witch hunt for Robinson’s roommate, whom Utah governor Spencer Cox alleged is trans—a rumor that spread quickly. (This despite the fact that the roommate, whom Cox also described as “incredibly cooperative,” has not publicly commented on their gender identity.) My editors and I discuss if and how to proceed. I think about the photos and videos of trans people on gun ranges being used to drum up fear, and wonder how—or if—our reporting can avoid the same fate.

I check in with my sources to see how they’re reacting to the news. There is a wariness in everyone. A sense that the temperature can’t be turned down, that some people cannot be defused of their conviction that we’re in an ideological war—or maybe even the beginnings of a real one. There are also nerves about how this piece will come together, but also a desire for their stories to be heard and told accurately; that’s about all I can offer, but it seems a worthwhile effort.

Bird tells me that, the week Kirk died, she’d had a range day planned to help a trans woman friend select her first firearm. A couple days after the shooting, she went to a gun store to pick up ammo for the session. “That is the most stared at I have been at a gun store for years,” she says. It’s a shop she’s been to before, where she’s normally asked if she needs help finding anything. This time, she says, people edged out of her way and avoided talking to her. Immediately after Kirk’s death, she remembers thinking, “Oh, please don't let it be one of us.” Even though Robinson isn’t trans, she feels people like her are being punished “collectively.”

But Bird does offer glimpses of optimism, in small ways. In August, a family member died, and she reconciled with her grandfather—the one who couldn’t accept her transition—at the funeral. “The first thing he said to me was ‘Jane,’ and he gave me a huge hug and called me by my name again, and said, ‘Your grandpa's finally come around.’” And despite the fact that she disagrees politically with many of the people she encounters at her local gun range, an instructor recently reminded members that the “Second Amendment has to be for everyone.”

Kasarda, meanwhile, is still fighting toxicity within the wider gun community. A few hours after Kirk was shot, he posted on Bluesky denouncing the crime: “Assassinations are not self nor community defense. This country is not at war, and we should *all* strive for it not to be. Violence begets violence and it is *never acceptable* to instigate it.” Then he sat in his home office and cried. Forums like AR15.com and Kiwi Farms still blamed him and accused him of being in “cya” (cover your ass) mode. Authorities still haven‘t stated Robinson’s motive, though an indictment listing the charges against him, including aggravated murder, includes an interview with his mother saying he started leaning “more to the left,” due to his “pro-gay and trans rights” views. Kasarda doesn’t think it matters much. “We’re headed to some very bad things as a result of this,” he says.

When I check in on Tacticool Girlfriend, she compares this moment to Italy’s Years of Lead, a period of left- and right-wing terrorism from the late 1960s to the 1980s, in which hundreds of people were killed in over 14,000 attacks. If America is going to have another civil war, she predicts, it’ll be closer to that than anything else.

Still, she says, she likes the life she’s made for herself here, and she doesn’t want to give it up. “Being a trans person in the world is inherently dangerous,” she says. “There are people who hate us for no good reason, no matter where we go.” At the end of the conversation, she tells me she has another shooting competition next weekend.

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