Before we shift attention to last night’s Walmart mass shooting, and inevitably gird ourselves for the next mass shooting, we need to highlight one particularly disgraceful aspect of the Club Q mass shooting. I’ll do so in the form of a question: How can we ever hope to curb gun violence if the people entrusted to keep us safe refuse to enforce the minimal gun laws we have?
It’s bad enough when those of us who support gun reform are unjustly accused of “politicizing” these senseless slaughters. It’s far worse when right-wing cops decide in advance, for ideological politicizing reasons, to ignore what’s already on the statute books. What happened last weekend in Colorado Springs is Exhibit A.
“Red flag” laws – which allow authorities to take firearms away from people deemed to be violently dangerous to themselves or others – are overwhelmingly popular. Colorado enacted such a law in 2020; two years earlier, a whopping 81 percent of Coloradans said they wanted it. But 37 of the state’s 64 counties have declared themselves to be “Second Amendment sanctuaries.” The cops in those locales have made it clear that even when confronted with evidence of a violent individual, they refuse to initiate court proceedings to seize that person’s guns and defuse any threat to the public.
That’s the deal in El Paso County, home of Colorado Springs, where, according to a locally-passed resolution, the red flag law “infringes upon the inalienable rights of law-abiding citizens.” The county’s top cop, Bill Elder decided for himself – in his word, “vigorously” – that the law was unconstitutional.
Alas, the county’s Second Amendment zealots have a very flexible definition of “law-abiding.” It clearly includes the Club Q shooter, who was arrested last year for threatening to bomb the house his mother was living in (she called the cops), and for stoking a confrontation with the cops who showed up. In a video he live-streamed to Facebook, he dressed himself in tactical gear and railed at the cops: “If they breach, I’mma fucking blow it to holy hell. So, uh, go ahead and come on in, boys, let’s fucking see it.”
All charges were later dropped, the record was sealed, and even though he’d directly threatened the cops, they ignored the red flag law – no surprise there, because county police have initiated zero red flag petitions since the law was enacted. They took no precautionary action to at least minimize the odds that the future Club Q shooter would not be locked and loaded.
Yup, it helps to be a white boy in the suburbs. But at some point, sure enough, the suburban white boy got himself a semi-auto and a handgun, and he flexed his Second Amendment rights. (Indeed, if he’d been saddled with felony charges – kidnapping and menacing – that alone would’ve barred him from passing a background check prior to purchase.)
As Leslie Bowman, the owner of the besieged house, has told the Associated Press, “If the justice system had followed through with something, anything…he wouldn’t likely have had access to be able to get a weapon and five people wouldn’t have died.”
I’m sick of writing about mass shootings; you’re sick of reading about them. The death toll triggered by our all-American gun lust will continue unabated. But the plot arc that climaxed at Club Q has been particularly grotesque. And since I’m almost at a loss for words, I’ll cede the next paragraph to Tim Miller, a Colorado native and former Republican strategist/communicator. He writes:
“This mass murder could have been prevented, but political leaders in Colorado Springs let it happen. They made a conscious choice that the lives of unarmed victims are less important than a lunatic’s right to acquire firearms…These ideologues decided that a deranged murderer’s right to an AR-15 (style weapon) had primacy over state law and the interests of the people they serve and the rights of the victims whose bodies now lie cold…It’s a story about Republican politicians making a choice to skirt the most common sense gun law imaginable for radical ideological ends.”
When Sheriff Elder was asked Monday about the Club Q shootings, he replied: “Nope, not gonna talk about it.” Perhaps all the blood on his hands has rendered him mute.
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But since we’re on the cusp of a fun holiday weekend, we deserve a good chuckle. Last night, Herschel Walker showed up on Sean Hannity’s show – flanked by chaperones Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham – to flack his (likely) doomed Senate bid. Flexing his vaunted powers of articulation, he said:
“This erection is about the people.”
Paging Dr. Freud!
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Wait, one more:
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Congress to get Donald Trump’s tax returns, definitively foiling his three-year stonewall. The vote was 9-0, with Trump’s three appointees in full agreement. Trump responded with this social media missive:
“The Supreme Court has lost its honor, prestige, and standing, & has become nothing more than a political body, with our Country paying the price.”
Now that is more delicious than turkey and gravy.