Just before midnight, hours before a scheduled drag brunch to honor the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a gunman opened fire in Club Q, a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club, killing five and wounding two dozen others. The alleged shooter, armed with an AR-15-style gun and wearing body armor, was reportedly tackled and subdued by bar patrons before he could kill more.
Police say they’re still looking for a motive. But I think it’s safe to say this was a crime of hate.
It’s horrific, saddening, enraging. But an attack like this was also inevitable, the all-too-predictable result of a wave of anti-LGBTQ, anti-trans hate propaganda spread by the likes of Christopher Rufo, Matt Walsh, and the “Libs of Tik Tok” Twitter account, subsidized by the owner of the right-wing “honor” site the Babylon Bee. It’s the very definition of “stochastic terrorism.”
Trans activists and journalists have been warning for some time that this kind of hate was going to get people killed. And so it has.
A moment of silence for the victims of this attack, and for all of those trans people murdered by those with hate in their hearts.
For details and updates on the attack, see the Washington Post and the New York Times.
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No, it was not inevitable. Sensible gun control law plus sensible mental healthcare in this country would stop a lot of this.
I see you were probably writing this when I was writing my notice earlier. thank you.
@mimihaha cracking down on the people inciting violence against us would ALSO help a lot. Matt Walsh and Libs of Tik Tok among others need to be taken down hard and fast. Preferably legally, but I’m also not against the idea, at this point, of someone doing to them what they’ve incited others to do to us.
(if they’re not inciting, they’ve got nothing to worry about…)
Apparently even now there doesn’t seem to be much push in Congress towards arresting or stopping people like Matt Walsh and Libs of Tiktok for inciting hate crimes and terrorism.
For f’s sake!
I feel like we need the ‘protest of shame’ where we just post images of someone shouting shame and ringing a bell by the thousands under all these accounts’ posts. I know it is just feeding engagement, either that or just tens of thousands of people reporting all these posts constantly.
@David: At last, a headline that doesn’t fit Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.
With easily-available guns, no mental health care and evil politicians, yes it was inevitable.
Colorado Springs is also the Evangelical Mecca, so even more so.
And TikTok doesn’t care because they’re owned by China, who’s even more homophobic than the US. Twitter is now entirely a cesspool instead of only partly, FB/Insta wants posts that drive page clicks and thus ad opportunities, etc. etc.
@Seth: I’m with you, brother.
Kindly leave the mentally ill out of this. The problem with these shooters isn’t that they’re crazy, it’s that they’re evil. The great majority of fascist scum are entirely neurotypical.
@Dalillama: I’d say somewhere above 90% of the fascist scum are neurotypical, because — being fascist — their peer groups don’t accept non-NT people. (along with women, PoC, LGBTQ and all)
Extraordinary isn’t it. I heard this news just after watching a tv doco on Freddy Mercury and the organising and presenting a fundraiser performance to raise funds for AIDS research.
Everyone seemed so nice as well as being sad. And I was doubly sad. It seems not to matter how hard we work, how carefully we frame laws, how long we’ve entrenched the good supplanting the evil … we have to constantly be on the alert. Rready willing and able to do it all over again.
Again.
Again
At the CBC we can see the story about this shooting well below the fold, just after the presumably more important story “How an Ontario flour mill saved an iconic Canadian hot cereal loved by northerners”.
So I guess single digits of dead in a terrorist attack in the US is no longer really news.
That’s horrible.
Beau of the Fifth Column relayed a report that the Retrumplitarians had spent FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS just for ads bashing trans people.
This guy is apparently also the son of a right-wing congressman. So yeah.
Also the hate and stochastic terrorism of the right-wing will never be criminalized. They’re adept at using euphemisms and “reasonable” sounding rhetoric, with just enough vague obfuscation to evade legal trouble. Going far enough to criminalize their propaganda is impossible in the US. So long as they stay back behind their current shroud of not directly and intentionally calling for violence. Anything that would work would violate the first amendment of the US Constitution. No judge, regardless of political position, would let a law that stops this stand.
Which is a bit of a mixed blessing. Because if we get the tools to criminalize speech, how do you think the fascists will use it? Just look at the middle east, or history to see how that always pans out in favor of fascists.
trans day of wrath is every day. fuck.
Honestly, yeah, this was the inevitable result of the anti-trans propaganda. From the extreme “They’re grooming children!” screamed extremists, to the more ‘respectable’ “We just have some ‘concerns’…” peddled by the likes of JK Rowling. It’s all part of the same thing, and the seemingly ‘respectable’ stuff only serves to normalise and mainstream the hate. This is the result.
What does it mean that they are looking for a motive? If a motive isn’t fairly obviously in of itself, they also have the guy in custody. I don’t think it’s likely he’s keeping his thoughts discreet.
@Dave: It means whichever media outlet that was does not want to admit the obvious truth, probably because they don’t want to “offend” the delicate fee-fees of conservatives in their audience or “politicize” it or whatever.
Also known as “they’re yellow, and borderline quislings to boot”.
“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” — Dante
Meta: Is there a reason for the WHTM server to be taking daily siestas from 11AM to noon these past couple of weeks? It didn’t used to do that, and the overwhelmingly-vast majority of other web sites don’t do that, and it’s damn annoying.
Bloody hell. Not again.
My condolences to the friends and family of the dead and best wishes for a swift recovery to the injured. Seth, I hope you don’t personally know any of the victims, but I can understand the grief at the attack on a place you know so well.
I’m seconding Dali, keep the mentally ill out of it. People only blame mental illness when the perpetrator is white. Mental illness isn’t correlated with committing violence, but a history of being abusive and entitled does. This murderer is a terrorist and this is clearly a hate crime.
Yes …
I think another avenue could be to do something similar as was done with Rick Santorum, where his name was used as slang for something he definitely wouldn’t approve of and it spread to such a degree that googling him had pretty good odds of turning up the subject of the slang term instead.
I mean, it’s playing dirty, but it’s not like these scum deserve better.
Understand, Republicans and Rightwingers absolutely support and love these acts of stochastic terrorism. They get the people they hate (in this case LGBTQ community) murdered, they denial responsibility, they tweet Thoughts & Prayers, they blame CHICAGO (i.e. blacks), then they go out and do it again. And they get paid by the NRA and Firearms Industrial Complex handsomely to do so.
@Battering Lamb: That’s a great idea. I’d be happy if we could get the names of these hateful assholes trashed like Santorum’s was.
I’ve got a little list…
I see that for once, he’s been properly charged with both murder and hate crimes.
Maybe if they’d done anything when he was violently criming before, this wouldn’t have happened.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/21/colorado-springs-shooting-mayor-hate-crime
“Kill him before he kills us” we’ve tried so hard to avoid this but the bigots just want us dead, and i resent them for the traumatic violence so many if us have had to engage in just to exist
I’m heartsick.
Have now found out his grandfather is a Trumpie ex-politician, his mother is a convicted arsonist, and his father is a porn actor/meth addict.
Republican family values, y’all.