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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Referring to the shooter exclusively as “that fascist shitstain in Colorado” will neatly solve any worries about pronoun usage.
@Dalillama: I dunno, there are sadly a lot of fascist shitstains there — they keep electing Boebert and lots of evangelical churches are headquartered there.
So it might not narrow it down much. Good idea, though.
People might be interested in https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/pre-attack-behaviors-of-active-shooters-in-us-2000-2013.pdf/
“The FBI could only verify that 25% of active shooters in the study had ever been diagnosed with a mental illness. Of those diagnosed, only 3 had been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder.”
I just googled. 46% of the general population received mental health services in the past year. Which is a much lower bar than getting a formal diagnosis, but still.