By Paul Lathrop | Contributing Editor
Lara Smith, national spokesperson for the Liberal Gun Club, appeared on the Dec. 28 edition of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Daily Bullet video series, revealing the group has several thousand paying members and about 15,000 who are active throughout the program’s social media platforms.
“The Liberal Gun Club started in about 2008,” Smith began, “and it started with a group of people who wanted to have a space online that was for people who support the Second Amendment, but are left of center because as we know, online can be not the friendliest of places. We really wanted it to be a more friendly spot for people who had different political views than the mainstream gun owners.”
Smith explained that the club started as a place to talk about guns members owned and similar topics. However, as the small club started to grow and The Pulse Nightclub shooting happened the club started getting a lot more interest and some media interviews started happening.
“As the club has grown it’s become more political,” Smith explained, “it’s become more diversified in what we do, but what we really want to do is we provide a place for people left of center to have a voice in the national conversation on firearms, and our big focus has become education.”
Smith the group has programs created by top-level trainers so that people who do not want NRA-based training still have a place to get quality training.
The pandemic has created a large increase in interest in The Liberal Gun Club as people from all ideologies have begun buying guns this year, she explained.
“We literally can’t keep up with the number of training requests we have had this year,” Smith said, “we have a whole YouTube channel that has all of our training videos on it.” she then explained about a series of videos that go from very beginning safety videos to more lighthearted videos, videos about veterans and women’s panels.
The discussion then turned to convincing legislators who are not normally on the gun rights side that proposed legislation hurts the very constituents that they represent. “We have had a lot of successes at the state level,” Smith stated, “going and talking to people and saying ‘Hey, have you really thought about the ramifications of what this bill means?” She then pointed out the successes they have had in Virginia, Oregon, and other places.
The Liberal Gun Club can be found at www.theliberalgunclub.com
