The mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs on November 19 was definitely a blow for many reasons.
It brought to mind the massacre at Pulse, an LGBTQ club in Orlando, where 49 people were gunned down by a self-radicalized jihadist in 2016.
It took place at a drag show the day before Transgender Memorial Day, which commemorates those murdered in transphobia, a year marked by Florida Gov. Nasty political attacks by gendered people.
It could be a product of deep-seated self-loathing. The alleged shooter, 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, identified as non-binary and used the they/them pronoun, according to their defense attorneys. Their father, MMA trainer Aaron Brinker, told the CBS affiliate in San Diego that his first thought after hearing from his child’s public defender was to ask why his child was in a gay bar.
“Then I went on to find out it was a gay bar. I said, ‘God, is he gay? I was terrified,’ Damn, is he gay? Disciples. I’m a conservative republican. we don’t do gay”
Another troubling detail: Aldridge’s arrest a year ago for threatening their mother with a homemade bomb was supposed to trigger Colorado’s red flag law, allowing authorities to confiscate their guns. But El Paso County declares itself a “Second Amendment sanctuary,” and the police there don’t seem to care about enforcing the law.
But here’s the thing I can’t get over: what an unarmed brewery owner — with the help of a trans woman, bumped his heel into the shooter’s face, God bless her — did to stop the Club Q carnage More locked and loaded than police in Uvalde, Texas, did at an elementary school in May. Five dead instead of dozens.
Richard Fierro, a two-time Bronze Star veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, responded instinctively. When the shooting began, Fierro — who was present with his wife, daughter, and her boyfriend — pulled the shooters from behind to the floor, drew their rifles, wrested their pistols from their hands, and threw the They were a mess.
Fierro’s wife and daughter survived with only minor injuries. His daughter’s boyfriend didn’t make it.
“I don’t know how I took the weapon from that guy, no idea,” he told New York Times“I’m just a dude, I’m a fat old vet, but I know I have to do something.”
Like many vets, Richard Fierro had a hard time putting the war behind him. In 2013, he returned home nervous. He saw a psychiatrist and started taking medicine. He also got rid of his gun. Insert the pins in.
Three days later, a Club Q mass shooting at a Chesapeake Walmart in Virginia killed six victims, all store employees. The Chesapeake was the 607th mass shooting in 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot.
As I write this on the morning of November 28th, 10 more incidents have been added to the list.
Using the narrower definition — a shooting in a densely populated area that kills three or more people — Chesapeake marks 12th mass shooting this year, tying an at least 40-year-old record set in 2018, with one month to go. Already 74 people have been killed in these incidents this year.
By comparison, from 1994 to 2004—the 10 years we had a federal assault weapons ban—there were 17 mass shootings that killed 106 people. It’s almost like we’re doing something.
But despite the proposal’s popularity and Democrats’ control of Washington, Congress has yet to reinstate the assault weapons ban. Democrats also haven’t banned high-volume magazines or introduced background checks on private sales, both of which have majority support. Instead, after Uvalde, Congress cobbled together a bipartisan empty-handed hamburger.
However, the Chesapeake did not use an assault rifle. The killer used a handgun — 155 of the 268 active shootings in which mass deaths have occurred since 1982.
Handguns are used in approximately 80% of murders in the United States; in 2020, more than 19,000 people were shot. A new report finds that the number of Americans carrying a loaded handgun every day doubled to 6 million from 2015 to 2019. Not surprisingly, the majority are white males and live in states with less restrictive gun laws.
Most gun carriers say they need the protection of others. But the evidence for defensive gun use is sketchy; the best data show that guns are seven times more likely to be used for crime than for victim protection, and only 1-2% of crime victims use guns for defense.
“Things we do know,” David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Center for Injury Control Research, told trace“Does having a gun in the home increase rates of suicide, gun accidents, and homicide, at least for women in the home?”
In fact, most suicides involve firearms, and suicides are more common than murders. Most firearm suicides involve handguns that are stored unlocked and loaded so the owner can quickly gain protection. But we know that putting up even small barriers can make people reconsider their suicidal urges; having no guns near them is a much better deterrent.
We also know that states with the most liberal gun laws (e.g. Mississippi, Louisiana, Wyoming) had the highest gun death rates in 2020, while states with the most restrictive laws (e.g. Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey) had the highest number of gun deaths lowest rate.
We know that while the number of guns per capita in the US is more than double that of Yemen, the second most gun-friendly country in the world, nearly 80% of homicides in the US are committed with firearms, compared to just 4% in the UK Homicide case, return Less than a quarter of the U.S. homicide rate.
Maybe miss my “guns don’t kill people” saying.
