Hard-left shooters are leading the gun culture revolution

Casarda wears an acid-washed sand shirt and tartan trousers — “Post-apocalyptic cowboy meets his dad,” Gun Bunny chimes in. A 51-year-old white, cis man whose love of subcultures extends to hackerism and industrial music and a career as a minister in the Satanic Temple, Cassarda eschews the title of “boss.” On the contrary, he says he has a “problem with authority” and “flirts” with the idea of ​​anarchy. But there’s no doubt that he’s largely responsible for building this alternative gun community, which he and others describe as “outsiders from the shooting community.”

His movement began about a decade ago with a YouTube channel, InRange TV, which now has about 930,000 followers. Cassarda’s videos frequently focus on firearms history that he believes many conservatives in the gun world would like to forget, such as slave revolts, members of a Native American tribe kicking the Ku Klux Klan’s ass in a standoff in North Carolina in 1958, and perhaps a transgender midwife in Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s cavalry. The channel’s description says it’s “anti-racist, pro-human liberation and LGBTQ+ rights,” and Cassarda is a champion of “2A For All,” the belief that everyone, especially minorities, should have access to guns. While this may seem like a normal stance for any gun-loving American, Cassarda’s views have so enraged right-wingers that there have been angry threads about him for years on AR15.com and Kiwi Farms, a forum notorious for harassing trans people. “We don’t want to talk about marginalized communities relying on firearms because we don’t like marginalized communities,” Cassarda says of how right-wingers view the issue.

These tensions have been exacerbated under Trump 2.0. After the president was re-elected, left-leaning, queer-focused firearms organizations, like the Liberal Gun Club and the Pink Pistols, told me they were seeing a spike in interest and attendance. In early September, media reported that Justice Department officials were considering a gun ban on transgender people. In response, one trans creator recommended that trans Americans who were planning to purchase firearms “do it now.”

Seconds before him After being shot to death, Charlie Kirk shared a myth about trans people spreading mass shootings. An attendee at a Turning Point USA event asked him, “Do you know how many transgender Americans have committed mass shootings in the last 10 years?” “Very many,” Kirk replied. Numbers from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive indicate there were five trans or nonbinary mass shootings 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.