National Rifle Association national spokesperson Dana Loesch continued the group’s tactic of offering surface-level support for LGBTQ gun ownership while simultaneously spouting attacks against the LGBTQ community from the organization’s news outlet, NRATV.

During the October 5 edition of her NRATV show Relentless, Loesch highlighted the “LGBTQ community and Second Amendment advocates working together” at the 33rd Annual Gun Rights Policy Conference in Chicago, where pro-gun LGBTQ groups the Pink Pistols and Operation Blazing Sword announced their merger.

Loesch claimed that gun ownership “is an obvious fit for the LGBT community” and owning a gun is about “refusing to be a victim, whether you’re part of the gay community, or an ethnic minority, or whether you’re a single woman”:

DANA LOESCH (HOST): Any group that is more susceptible to violence will obviously and clearly want to protect itself. And that’s exactly why supporting the human right to self-defense is an obvious fit for the LGBT community.

…

LOESCH: That’s really what this is all about -- refusing to be a victim, whether you’re part of the gay community, or an ethnic minority, or whether you’re a single woman. I mean, it’s not about identity politics. But some individuals, and I’ve described before the perpetrator behind Pulse nightclub, or the individual who killed a teenager in the East Coast before then targeting a gay club in Seattle and said that he did it specifically because their lifestyles were antithetical to his radicalized beliefs. It does exist and it has happened in the United States. It’s not about identity politics, it’s about protecting yourself and other individuals.

While she encourages members of the LGBTQ community to own firearms, Loesch has also promoted hateful and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in the past -- comparing an anti-gay baker having to serve a gay couple to “slavery” and claiming that transgender individuals have a “mental illness.”

Referring to Chelsea Manning, a transgender woman, Loesch said earlier this year on NRATV, “Just because you get some boobs, and you put some red lipstick on, poorly applied, and a very poor smoky eye bad dye job, that don’t make you a chick.”

National Rifle Association board members and organization leaders have a well-documented track record of espousing bigoted and homophobic rhetoric toward LGBTQ people while also exploiting violence against them to promote fear and increased gun ownership, a strategy that enrichens gun manufacturers that donate to the NRA.