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What do you do when you’re a gun-loving leftist who doesn’t fit into mainstream American gun culture? That's a question @manishakrishnan.bsky.social set out to answer this summer when she attended a Brutality match, an inclusive firearms competition in Idaho.

There are a few Brutality matches a year, combining physically exhausting tasks with marksmanship. That means a lot of running, throwing kettle bells, and shooting from strange locations, like from the back of an abandoned school bus.

But the people there embraced a variety of subcultures, from hacking to cosplay to polyamory. The event even had a leftist theme: a worker's rights uprising on Mars.

Then in September, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed and the nature of the story @manishakrishnan.bsky.social was writing completely changed. Despite the fact that the suspect in Kirk's shooting, Tyler Robinson, is not trans, trans communities got a lot of blame from the right-wing rage machine.