Not just asleep at the switch, but flipping it
The Associated Press supplies background on the Colorado Springs mass shooting at a gay nightclub:
A year and a half before he was arrested in the Colorado Springs gay nightclub shooting that left five people dead, Anderson Lee Aldrich allegedly threatened his mother with a homemade bomb, forcing neighbors in surrounding homes to evacuate while the bomb squad and crisis negotiators talked him into surrendering.
Yet despite that scare, there’s no public record that prosecutors moved forward with felony kidnapping and menacing charges against Aldrich, or that police or relatives tried to trigger Colorado’s “red flag” law that would have allowed authorities to seize the weapons and ammo the man’s mother says he had with him.
You read that right.
Half the United States is not just asleep at the switch, but flipping it.
Laws that might have prevented mass murder went ignored:
Gun control advocates say Aldrich’s June 2021 threat is an example of a red flag law ignored, with potentially deadly consequences. While it’s not clear the law could have prevented Saturday night’s attack — such gun seizures can be in effect for as little as 14 days and be extended by a judge in six-month increments — they say it could have at least slowed Aldrich and raised his profile with law enforcement.
“We need heroes beforehand — parents, co-workers, friends who are seeing someone go down this path,” said Colorado state Rep. Tom Sullivan *, whose son was killed in the Aurora theater shooting and sponsored the state’s red flag law passed in 2019. “This should have alerted them, put him on their radar.”
Where police ignored existing law, another AP story explains what did stop the killing:
As bullets tore through a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, killing five people and wounding many more, one patron who had been partying moments before rushed into action, grabbing a handgun from the suspect, hitting him with it and pinning him down until police arrived just minutes later.
That customer was one of at least two whom police and city officials credit with stopping the gunman and limiting the bloodshed in Saturday night’s shooting at Club Q. The violence pierced the cozy confines of an entertainment venue that has long been a cherished safe spot for the LGBTQ community in the conservative-leaning city.
“Had that individual not intervened this could have been exponentially more tragic,” Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers told The Associated Press.
Podcaster Dan Savage says what others won’t:
I posted this earlier, but it bears another viewing:
The right will not stop. They have to be crushed, crushed, humiliated and repudiated at the ballot box. November 2022 provided a hint that the public has had enough. Let’s hope 2022 was just a foretaste.
*That’s a different Tom Sullivan although John Hickenlooper twice mistook me for him.