The Club Q Massacre, A Coloradan’s Thoughts
One of the heroes was not gay. The army vet was with his wife, daughter and daughter’s boyfriend watching the drag show. As the shots began, the daughter and her boyfriend were dancing. She would break her knee attempting to get away. The boyfriend would be one of the dead. The hero was one of the men who tackled the gunman, took his handgun, and hit the gunman with it.
I consider it unfortunate that they didn’t beat him considerably harder.
I live in the suburbs of Denver. Here, a charity attempted to implement a no gay employees policy and the community came down on them like a hammer. Club Q is in Colorado Springs, about an hour from here. The two communities could not be more different.
The gunman had previous run-ins with the law. He was arrested for threatening to blow up his house and kill his mother, but not charged. Had he been charged, had he had a record, he could not have bought the “long gun”, the Colorado Springs euphemism for an AR-15 and five people would still be alive and eighteen more unhurt.
Colorado has the nation’s only openly gay governor. It is also home to one of the most vile homophobes on the planet, Lauren Boebert. Boebert’s tweets show particular hatred for trans people. The Republican candidate for governor, Heidi Ganahl, attempted to spread a false rumor that schoolkids in Colorado were identifying as cats. This rhetoric is not harmless. Five are dead in Colorado Springs as a result.
Club Q was billed as a safe space where anyone could come and be themselves with whomever they wanted to be with. As mentioned above, one of the heroes was not a part of the “community.” What then is a safe space today? Schools are not, nor are grocery stores, nor Planned Parenthood clinics, nor churches, nor city streets if someone gets upset about your dog. What space is safe from someone who buys a weapon of mass murder with the intent to use it, or even gets angry over a dog pooping on the sidewalk? Buying the weapon does not make one more likely to commit a mass murder but it certainly increases the person’s odds of success, should that become his aim.
Yes, his. These mass murderers are generally males between 18 and 25 years old. Anderson Lee Aldrich was 22 years old, in the middle of the distribution. Kyle Rittenhouse took his AR to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and killed two people with it in the open. A man in Denver got upset over a couple walking their dog and shot the woman dead on the street. Aldrich had previous run-ins with the law, he was arrested in 2021 for making a bomb threat and a standoff with police. In the end, he was not charged.
Colorado has a red-flag law. The sheriff could have petitioned the court to have Aldrich’s weapons taken from him and prohibited him from buying more. But El Paso County, Colorado, has declared itself a “Second Amendment Sanctuary” and the Sheriff has not referred a single case for enforcement under the Red Flag law. He does not believe in the law. Based on Aldrich being a threat to others as demonstrated by his arrest, he never should have been permitted to have his weapon of mass murder.
And now, Colorado Springs is expressing its support and sympathy for the “community”, a community it betrayed through its insistence on “conservative principles.”
Thoughts and prayers are being offered. Please, don’t bother. Thoughts and prayers will not help. If all there is to offer is thoughts and prayers, we may as well acknowledge that mass shootings are simply a part of life in Colorado. Live with it. Concrete action might be effective, a sheriff taking action to keep weapons out of the hands of a violent man might have helped. A community that did not vilify its LGBTQ members, politicians that did not use bigoted rhetoric to score political points with their base would be welcome, a local government that valued all citizens, regardless of race, creed or orientation might have prevented this.
Judges in El Paso county approve about one third of all petitions to have guns removed under the Red Flag law, the lowest rate of any reasonably large jurisdiction in the state.
Colorado is a wonderful place. Our climate is fantastic, the scenery unparalleled, life is good here. Unfortunately, there is a radical right-wing element to our population that, since Columbine, has erupted time after time in sprees of senseless killing. I lived in Germany when Columbine made international news.
Imagine having to explain that to a culture that tightly controls who can buy a gun.
Our community here in Denver deeply cares. We are generous and loving. As mentioned, the poor charity whose bigoted policy became public knowledge immediately lost public support, but that was Denver. Colorado Springs is a different place where it is not uncommon to see people carrying openly in grocery stores, or sitting drinking at bars with their sidearm.
Both the city and the county vote deep red.
I am numb.
