Matthew Shepard shouldn't have been killed. If he had a gun he might be alive today.
Face it, gays live an extremely high risk lifestyle. High risk sex with strangers. Essentially prostitutes that do it for free.
They die young, they do a lot of stupid, risky things that sometimes get you killed. And they do them voluntarily.
Sometimes the people you want to have anonymous sex with, that you don’t know, turn out to be the people that might kill you.
Matt also chose to be unarmed while doing extremely risky behavior. Lots of people make the conscious choice to believe nothing bad will ever happen to them.
Even if he did have a gun, they could have always surprised him and taken him off-guard. Having a gun doesn’t always mean that guy wins.
I have a lot less sympathy for people that die doing perverted, dangerous, stupid things by their own choice and place themselves in a situation that kills them.