"Pick on someone your own caliber," declares its excellent Web site (www.pinkpistols.org). "We are dedicated to the legal, safe and responsible use of firearms for self-defense of the sexual-minority community," it continues. "The more people know that members of our community may be armed, the less likely they will be able to single us out for attack."

Such deterrence already may have prevented homophobic bloodshed. According to Doug Krick, the Boston Internet engineer who founded Pink Pistols in July 2000: "While I can't say that we are completely responsible for it, I can say that there has not been a 'fag bashing' in any towns where we have chapters after they were founded."

Pink Pistols is named after a March 13, 2000 Salon article by Jonathan Rauch, an openly gay writer now at the National Journal. He prescribed armed self-defense as a cure for anti-gay violence. He dramatically made his case with the story of Tom Palmer, a Washington think-tank scholar. Palmer and a male friend were in a rough section of San Jose, Calif., when a gang of 20 hoodlums started taunting them.

"Hey, you f---ing faggots!" one yelled. "When we're done with you, they'll never find your bodies." Palmer and his pal ran for their lives, with the thugs in hot pursuit. Then Palmer pulled a semi-automatic handgun from his backpack, stood and waved it beneath a street light. His tormentors swiftly retreated.

"There's no question," Palmer said, "that my friend and I would have been at least very seriously beaten, and maybe killed."

Bronx resident Jeton Ademaj is organizing a Pink Pistols club here "so people can socialize and network and support each other's right to self-defense." Ademaj complains that Gotham's costly, Byzantine gun controls frustrate law-abiding citizens who seek firearms for personal protection.

Pink Pistols chapters hold monthly meetings and frequent competitions at shooting ranges, to promote marksmanship and camaraderie. It also endorses candidates who "support the Second Amendment as well as the rights of consenting adults to love each other however they wish." Based on responses to a detailed questionnaire, its Web site evaluates contenders in local, state and federal races in 14 states for 2001-2002.

Most intriguing is how straight conservatives respond to the Pink and gay liberals react to the Pistols.

"I know of absolutely no conservatives who have attacked us," says Washington lobbyist Austin Fulk. He often joins the group's Northern Virginia chapter for target practice at the headquarters of the National Rifle Association, with which Pink Pistols has collaborated on issue advocacy before California's state legislature.

"The concept of 'out of the closet' is brilliant," says Michael Bane, a straight gun-rights activist who works with Pink Pistols. "Since we represent about 50 percent of the households in America, if gun owners would 'come out of the closet,' we would be unbeatable."

All of this makes gay liberals very nervous.

"I am, and we are, very anti-gun," Clarence Patton of New York's Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project told Philadelphia Gay News last July. "We don't think guns solve any problems, and may create more problems."

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Sue Hyde told Southern Voice last month: "We are not going to settle our scores as a community by having a shoot-out at the OK Corral."

Doug Krick shrugs at these arguments. "There is a certain segment that believes that the world would be better without guns, therefore the message is to ban guns . . . and that would not be desirable, even if you could. As the saying goes, 'God made all men, but Colt made all men equal.' "