I struggle to understand such hate in the world. It is incomprehensible and intolerable. This could have happened to so many people I know and love. It makes me ill to think about it and so sad.
Alleged Club Q shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich is the grandson of GOP California State Assemblyman Randy Voepel from San Diego, who voiced support for the Jan 6 Capitol attack.
Aldrich was arrested in 2021 after his mother reported to police he was threatening to harm her with a homemade bomb and multiple weapons, according to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office. He was arrested after a standoff and charged with six felonies. But he was not prosecuted, records show. The El Paso County district attorney has not commented on why the case was dropped.
And how did you know the shooter didn’t have a 2nd gun or a knife? The answer is nobody knew that. All that was known at the time was there was a mass killing event in progress.
So let’s celebrate the bravery of those who took him down. Let’s talk about what happened.
FWIW, any time I hear of Colorado Springs, FotF and Dobson are the first (okay, only) thing to come to mind.
I’m not going out of my way to defend Colorado Springs - I live here because my wife’s from here, I went to College here (meeting her then), and much of her extended family lives here.
It is, as pertains to the event sparking the OP, a deeply conservative part of the state despite it’s population, and often finds itself very much at odds with the much more liberal leaning of the rest of the front range.
Which informs a lot of the hyper-local attitudes towards LGBTQ communities. So as Colorado as a whole moves from purple to light blue, Colorado Springs specifically tends to double down in reaction.
Further editorializing would detract from the thread, but I did want to confirm that while such attitudes are prevalent in the community, the actual response to the specific event has been overwhelmingly supportive, to the tune of, and I’m paraphrasing someone I overhead today at the store “I don’t agree with their lifestyle, but no one should be shot over it, and I hope the killer spends the rest of their life behind bars.”
Which while not exactly encouragingly open-minded, is a lot better than I’ve sometimes come to expect.
Apologies to the thread for touching on political opinions in breaking news, I’m trying to thread the needle of providing a local’s understanding of the community while avoiding the jabs.
These people are insane. Not JUST the shooter, but most Conservatives in general. I’m having a difficult time NOT hating those who hate people for just being themselves.
I’m mad, and hope this guy rots in prison.
Not just mental health. Let’s cut right to it: how was someone like that able to possess one or more firearms? Whether he was mentally ill, a shitty person, or both, he should not have been able to possess firearms.
Let’s also not ignore the reality that we have a young white male from a conservative family who apparently engaged in some pretty serious criminal activities and faced some pretty damn severe charges a year ago, but who ultimately faced no serious legal consequences.
The best option is the guy being subdued. Someone who is subdued is not going to continue killing.
Sometimes killing the assailant is the only available option. Sometimes the risk of trying to subdue them is too great. But it doesn’t change the fact that, in an ideal world, you would subdue all criminals rather than kill them.
I don’t know why you don’t just accept that, yes, all else being equal, if you can stop the guy from ever shooting, but keep him alive, that’s better than having to kill him to stop him. It just seems like you’re doubling down rather than admitting you didn’t think everything through.
It’s okay. We all make mistakes.
Moderating
Enough with the hypotheticals. This is a breaking news thread. Making up a lot of hypotheticals that might have happened detracts from what did happen and how people are reacting and similar follow-up. This is becoming a significant hijack.
Don’t make it personal.
No warnings, but please, everyone, stick to the topic.
I visited Colorado Springs on business many years ago. Reading this sort of thing makes me sad because my only experience with it was as a city located in a beautifully scenic place in the Rockies, and the site of the disk drive research and manufacturing division of Digital Equipment Corporation, with two large manufacturing facilities in Rockrimmon. So my impression of it was (a) beautifully scenic, and (b) high-tech. Little did I know of its sordid politics.
A lot of people will be afraid to go to a club next weekend. Or they’re go and be looking over their shoulders.
I went to a business conference once at Colorado Springs. I didn’t get a “high tech” vibe, but I was impressed by the physical beauty of the area, and I enjoyed some light hiking nearby. I’m sad that my memory of the place is marred by this tragedy.
Moderating:
No political jabs in breaking news threads
Returning to the discussion of the shooter and the community -
Colorado Spring’s demographics do not reflect a lot of diversity. A point made in the articles is the club is one of two (and previously the only one) catering to the LGBTQ community, which is something of an outlier in a city of this size. The town as a whole is very white, perceives itself as very middle class, and very Christian, although that definition varies dramatically from group to group in town.
Still, I would generally characterize the sentiment of that community to be more on the ‘holier than though’ claims of moral superiority rather than the ‘hate’ side of the spectrum. And to be extra clear, there is a huge spectrum of attitudes across the city, including some of the sub communities that fit right in with the classic Rocky Mountain High attitudes associated with places like Aspen or Boulder. So it’s not all one thing or another, as we’ve seen across the nation.
The other huge local influence is that preponderance of active duty and retired military, and entire businesses that cater to such and to the expected conservative tendencies of that community. So those more conservative members of the community (religious, military, and other) reinforce and perpetual the existing trends and tend to come together as overall state attitudes change.
But I don’t get the feeling that it’s these attitudes that are behind the shooting. For anyone who missed the more recent updates on the shooter:
This person has likely been dangerous to the people around them for some time, and prepared for this carefully between the quasi-military gear and recent weapon purchases. This is almost certainly a planned attack rather than any sort of spontaneous rising of local hate as it were.
The last thing I’ll mention about the community is that, sadly, it does not surprise me if, as currently being reported, the shooter was previously indicted for crimes that should have left him locked up, or at a minimum ineligible to ever purchase a firearm, but was not prosecuted due to the attitudes of local law enforcement and the DA. Further speculation though is probably valueless until we get a lot more information, and I hope that it leads to some positive changes in the community.
Local news is saying that the 2021 case against the shooter was dropped because …
Sources told the Problem Solvers that charges in the bomb threat case were dismissed because the victim (the suspect’s mother) refused to cooperate with investigators.
According to one of the owners – I didn’t catch the name – on NBC Radio News, Club Q had been running active shooter drills after the Pulse incident.
Ugh. How depressing that they needed to do that. 
There are of course many large billboards along I-95 in greater Miami advertising this and that. One billboard for some time has carried various messages of the “Can’t we all just get along?” nature rather than commercial ads. Whoever writes their copy is good; it’s always short, punchy, & memorable.
Here’s one that particularly struck me recently:
Does your church need armed guards?
'Cuz our synagogue does.
That says an awful lot about US society in very few words. And none of it good. There are lots of other venues, including LGBTQ hangouts, that could substitute for “synagogue” and the message would still be true.
I wonder if their drills were effective in stopping the killer?
I know of churches with armed ushers.
Yes it does.