COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — On a frigid Tuesday afternoon in Colorado Springs, Gov. Jared Polis knelt in front of a makeshift memorial and drew a heart on the asphalt.
A sea of roses and candles splayed in front of him, leading up to the portraits of five club-goers and Club Q, the scene of the latest mass shooting to shatter Colorado.
“Club Q will be back, and the community will be back, people will feel safe and people will learn from this,” Polis said shortly after adding his own mark to the spontaneous memorial.
Addressing gun violence was a top priority before the attack at Club Q, lawmakers say. But the massacre there — “unfortunately, another chapter in a long story of tragedies,” as Senate President Steve Fenberg put it — underscores the need for action.
Though the shooting has prompted lawmakers to discuss everything from an assault weapon ban to age restrictions on the purchase of firearms, they said policymakers cannot continue to wait for a mass shooting to react to gun violence here.
“Everything should be on the table,” Fenberg, a Boulder Democrat, said. “We should prioritize what we think is going to save the most lives and have the most impact. That should be our north star.”
In the wake of the Club Q shooting and another attack at a Walmart three days later, President Joe Biden has called on Congress to pass legislation — introduced last year — to ban assault weapons nationally. U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet told the Denver Post on Tuesday that he had now agreed to co-sponsor the bill in the Senate. A ban already passed the U.S. House, but with just over three weeks left in a jam-packed lame-duck session, its prospects in the Senate appear dim.
Bennet, who displayed images of those killed at Club Q on the Senate floor Tuesday, said he had met with families who lost loved ones in the 2012 Aurora shooting several weeks ago and that they had specifically asked him to sign on to the bill. During his speech on the floor, he called the grim, steady drumbeat of mass shootings “a disgrace.”
“It was just last year when I spoke on this floor to remember the lives we lost in Colorado at the King Soopers in Boulder,” he said. “And it’s with unimaginable pain that I am here once again, on this floor, with a list of names of people who lost their lives senselessly. Colorado is hurting. We are tired of this.”
Red flag reform
Polis tested positive for COVID-19 shortly before the shooting, delaying when he could pay his respects in person. On Sunday, he appeared on two national news shows via video to address the tragedy. He, like state lawmakers, honed in on the state’s red flag law as a top — though not only — target for policy change.
“We’re certainly going to take a hard look at why the red flag law wasn’t used in this case and the case of the King Soopers shooter, what can be used to better publicize, make available and add different parties to make sure that it’s used when it should be used,” Polis said on Meet the Press.
Polis focused on the red flag law again during his remarks Tuesday at the memorial.
Passed in 2019, the red flag law allows law enforcement officers and family or household members to petition a court to temporarily bar a person from possessing a firearm if they’re deemed a risk to themselves or others. The suspect in the Colorado Springs shooting, Anderson Lee Aldrich, appears to have been arrested in June 2021 after allegedly threatening family members with a bomb and other weapons.
Aldrich was not subject to the red flag law, and El Paso County officials — including the sheriff and county commission — actively opposed the law previously. An affidavit describing Aldrich’s apparent 2021 arrest, obtained by KKTV, alleges that investigators were told the suspect wanted to become a mass killer. Few details of the 2021 arrest are available. The case appears to have been sealed, and El Paso County officials have refused to comment on it or confirm that Aldrich — who matches the name and age of the person arrested in 2021 — is the same person arrested then.
Polis called it “worrisome” and “dangerous” to rule out using the law. But he, like others who spoke to the Post for this story, noted many details about the Club Q shooting remain unknown.
Still, the shooting has drawn intense scrutiny to the red flag law and how it’s being used — or not — by local authorities. Rep. Tom Sullivan, an Aurora Democrat who sponsored the red flag bill in 2019, said Aldrich appeared to be a “prime” example of when the law should be used. On the Sunday shows, Polis floated adding district attorneys to people who can file a red flag petition, formally known as an extreme risk protection order. Fenberg threw a few other professions into the mix, including the attorney general, teachers and social workers.
Colorado’s current law is in line with most of the 19 states, plus Washington, D.C., which have similar statutes on their books. But if lawmakers here expanded it, it would become among the most accessible in the country and would be similar to California, Hawaii and New York, which allow other professions beyond family and police to seek intervention.
Sullivan, whose son died in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting, said the law’s breadth was limited by the Democrats’ slim majority in the Senate three years ago, when it was passed. That’s since changed, with the party picking up seats across the legislature on Election Day and Sullivan among the new class of senators.
He echoed Fenberg’s call for expanding who can file a petition under the law. But there are other problems, he and others said. One is a lack of public awareness that the law even exists, something other states have encountered as they’ve rolled out their own programs.
Sullivan said it’s the purview of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention — created via legislation he sponsored in 2021 — to help raise awareness for it. While the Colorado Springs shooting has focused attention on the law, Sullivan and others said, it should also be used more frequently to limit suicides and other forms of gun violence on a daily basis.
The other issue is local officials choosing not to utilize the law, Sullivan and Rep. Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat, said. Both lawmakers stressed that there are still unanswered questions about the suspect, their motive and what happened in 2021. But the frustration with local authorities predates the shooting.
“It was such a big deal and big lift for Colorado to pass this law, we’ve done it to help us keep ourselves safe,” Bacon said. “But it only works if people use it.”
Sullivan and Bacon questioned if officials in El Paso County or elsewhere who don’t utilize the red flag law should be held liable for attacks that could’ve been prevented through its use. Both floated attorney general investigations or the legislature withholding funding from counties or agencies that refuse to make use of it.
“They say if they don’t want to, what are you going to do about it?” Sullivan said. “So maybe we need to find a way to do something about it.”
“As much as we continue to talk about it and the vigils go on and the funerals haven’t even started, there are a vast majority of people down in that county who have already turned a page and moved on to something else,” he said. “They knew this was going to happen and they’re OK with it, as long as it doesn’t happen to them.”
Other steps
Beyond the red flag law, Bacon said there’s an array of potential gun control measures lawmakers could consider. She ticked off loopholes related to gun sales, instituting higher age limits for purchasing firearms, and a potential assault rifle ban, among others.
Fenberg said he’s open to an assault weapon ban. It would be technically difficult to define in law what constitutes an assault weapon, though other states have done so, he said. However, he noted, most gun deaths and gun violence aren’t at the end of an assault weapon’s barrel, even if those mass shootings garner the most attention.
“(It would be) symbolic in some ways, but may not be the policy priority that would save the most lives,” he said.
On his appearances on the Sunday shows, Polis didn’t call for a ban on assault weapons, as President Joe Biden did in the wake of this shooting and another in Virginia.
Sullivan worked on a bill earlier this year to require a person be 21 before they could purchase an assault weapon. He said he shelved it after Polis’ office told him the governor would veto the bill should it pass. A spokesman for the governor said Polis “never saw a specific proposal on this topic” and that he couldn’t comment on it. Asked about gun control measures he would not support Tuesday, Polis turned the subject to the red flag law and the possibility that the shooter used unregistered firearms.
Sullivan said he now plans to bring the bill back, but with a key change: He’ll now push for a requirement that a person be 21 before they can purchase any firearm at all.
Democratic lawmakers need to get together and come up with a plan for what they want to achieve on gun violence over the next several years, Bacon said. The lesson from the red flag law is that it’s not enough to just pass laws, she said: There needs to be tracking, enforcement, benchmarks and cohesion. These conversations can’t only happen in the wake of a Club Q or a King Soopers shooting.
“We do have the highest suicide rate in the country. The Black community is 3% of the state but has a homicide rate 11 times the state average,” she said. “People don’t know what the problem is. And we can’t just keep waiting for mass shootings.”
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