An excited Richard Fierro didn’t know what he would hear or who he’d spot next as he sat in the gallery of the Capitol on the night of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. Someone nearby was talking about Mar-a-Lago; a Minnesota teacher told him about her work; he met a basketball player who’d been tasered in Milwaukee. Mr Fierro, an Army veteran and Colorado brewery owner, soaked it all in.
“When you’re in the middle of it, in the gallery just watching, everybody’s kind of in one pool, which is the best,” Mr Fierro, 45, tells The Independent after his return home to Colorado Springs. “We’re not split up like Congress is right down the bottom -- and so that’s tense on the bottom ... But when you look at the gallery, everybody’s mixed in and nobody knows who anybody is, until they start talking. That’s what America is about.”
He’d been at another great example of diversity nearly three months earlier that would alter the course of his life and hurtle the veteran onto the national stage. Mr Fierro, his wife and daughter were enjoying a night with friends at Club Q in Colorado Springs when a gunman stormed in and launched an attack with a veritable arsenal. Instinct took over as soon as Mr Fierro heard the small arms fire, and he heroically tackled to the ground suspect Andersen Lee Aldrich, 22, who now faces more than 300 charges. Before Mr Fierro took down the shooter, more than a dozen were wounded, including his friends and daughter, Kassandra, and five were killed -- including Kassandra’s boyfriend, Raymond Green Vance.
“I’m not a hero,” Mr Fierro said humbly in the days after the attack. “I’m just some dude.”
The survivors and the nation disagreed, and Mr Fierro has been universally lauded for his actions -- actions he wishes he’d never had to take. He attended President Biden’s speech as a guest of Colorado Congressman Jason Crow, a fellow Army veteran.
“He just wanted to bring me out and kind of highlight what had happened -- and hopefully, that keeps people talking about it,” Mr Fierro says of the Club Q massacre. “And maybe this will get a couple more dollars, or a couple more cards or just sympathy for the folks that were in that event.
“It was really scary, and it’s a sad thing ... all these kids are struggling” from physical and emotional injuries, he says of many victims present at the Colorado Springs massacre.
“I wanted to highlight that, hey, this is a real problem,” Mr Fierro tells The Independent. “And you’ve got veterans out here running around dealing with war on American soil, and that’s not what we’ve come home for. We’ve come home to be safe and to their families and do all that other stuff outside of the country.”
He adds: “The amount of fire we took in there, I mean, even in combat, it wasn’t that fast and that much ... at the end of the day, none of my family should be experiencing the combat I signed up to do far away at home. And it was in our backyard.”
Now his wife, daughter, friends and community are dealing with the same residual effects he suffered after combat, their senses of safety and security stripped away.
About a month after the shooting, Mr Fierro and his family took what, before Club Q, would have been an innocuous trip to Buffalo Wings. It wasn’t.
“It was probably one of the scariest moments we ever had going out, just because there was so many people, and it was a wide open space,” Mr Fierro tells The Independent. “And we’re like, ‘Dude ... [if] this happens in here, everybody’s gone’ ... Those are the moments for us that were forever changed.”
He never expected his wife and daughter “to ever have to deal with that kind of test -- being shot at and trying to figure out how to stay alive or stop the activity. It’s just not something people should think through. So ... I’ve been preaching a whole lot of, you know, people be nice to each other.”
That was certainly happening on Tuesday in the gallery of the State of the Union, as guests greeted each other and swapped tales in what Mr Fiero calls “probably the coolest thing in the whole event, which nobody really sees because we’re all up there -- nobody knows who those people are.” He and his guests “never even asked what affiliation we were,” he adds. “We just had great conversations.”
It was a different story altogether on the floor of the House chambers, as Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled the President as he spoke about the fatal fentanyl crisis, of all things, and Republicans shook their heads disapprovingly -- or worse -- as he spoke about gun reform.
“You could tell the tension in there, and everybody, I think when we were watching, was like, ‘Wow, this is a process -- and these folks are upset.’”
Mr Fierro, who spent 15 years in the military and has undergone concealed carry training with his wife, does not profess to have the answers, and he’s careful not to be political; while in DC, he posed for photos with politicians that interest his family, but he’s keeping everything off social media because he doesn’t “want people to think I’m picking a side.” He lives in a heavily conservative pocket of a gun-friendly state -- a state that has seen more than its fair share of mass shootings: Columbine. Aurora. Boulder. Colorado Springs.
Ellen Mahoney, whose husband was killed two years ago when a gunman opened fire at a Boulder supermarket, was another Colorado resident sitting in the gallery on Tuesday. Almost immediately upon her return home, she attended a gun violence town hall in Denver.
“It was an incredible experience and one I’ll never forget,” Ms Mahoney, who was a guest of Colorado Congressman Joe Neguse, tells The Independent. “I thought Preident Biden’s address was powerful and full of promise for our country. He talked about our many accomplishments, which gave me a lot of hope. The president also shed light on painful topics such as police brutality and gun violence and I was very glad to hear him say loudly and clearly that we need to ‘Ban assault weapons once and for all.’”
Like Mr Fierro, Ms Mahoney will not be drawn when it comes to pointing political fingers; both Coloradans touched by gun violence clearly believe that the current polarisation and constant partisan fighting are doing nothing to help make Americans safer.
“I was very happy when President Biden talked about Democrats and Republicans working together because I feel it’s important to solve the difficult and painful challenges that ace our communities, our country and world,” Ms Mahoney tells The Independent. “Like many, my hope is for a safer and more peaceful world.”
Her neighbour about 100 miles south in Colorado Springs says he hopes he’s “inspiring a little bit of unity;” Mr Fierro says he understands the need for debate and discourse, but the most important thing is action. Members of Congress -- with their pins and petty Twitter wars and cringe-inducing inflammatory claims -- could certainly learn a thing or two from an unarmed father who didn’t even think before tackling a 6’4, 280-pound walking arsenal.
“Everybody polarizes for reasons,” Mr Fierro says measuredly. “And a lot of it has to do with just getting attention, and I understand that. But at the end of the day, the work [members of Congress] are doing has to mean something. And if they’re just going to run around and boast or record or just grab media attention, what are we accomplishing? And that’s what I think should be first, before anything else, regardless of what side you’re on -- it just should be about, honestly, what the country needs.”
And what the country needs, he says, is to not fear war-like attacks on home soil, as Americans like his wife and daughter are going about their days. The freedoms and diversity he enjoyed on 19 November before shooting started at Club Q are what he fought for, but those are the freedoms currently in jeopardy.
“I literally talked to the owner of Club Q ... he was asking me, ‘How are you doing security?’ says Mr Fierro, whose Atrevida Beer Company is a ten-minute drive from the site of the massacre. “And I go, ‘I can’t. I’m not going to militarize my brewery.’ People come here to have a good time. if I’m going to a place that’s gonna wand me or put metal detectors and have a police guy, or a guy with a gun out front, why am I going there?
“That’s not what I signed up for. That’s not American. We should be able to go wherever we want, do what we need to do, and not have to have somebody with a gun. “
He says: “The freedoms that we have are really, to me, invaluable; that’s sort of the reason America is the greatest place. And that’s the kind of thing that people need to take to debate and figure out as a group ... [politicians] should be able to come to the table and figure this thing out, do the hard work.”
Despite the rancour, Mr Fierro was honoured and humbled to be a congressional guests, an appreciative awe creeping into his voice that soon turns bittersweet.
“It was unreal to see the Capitol like that and how it works, and these congressmen running around voting and running to another meeting ... it was just a beehive of activity, and it was a beautiful thing to see, because that’s how this thing works, right?” he tells The Independent.
“And then the other part that really sucked is when .. I looked around and I’m like, ‘Who in the hell would have would have desecrated this place?’ And it was really touching, because you were like, ‘This is the most beautiful thing this country’s got ... that insurrection thing, it was just disheartening to know that that had happened in it. And you see the doors to the Senate office, or the Senate, and then the doors to the Congress, the representatives, and you’re like, ‘Dude, I remember seeing that in these videos, and it was just a horrible scene.’ It’s just not cool.”
His own attendance was tinged with the same bittersweetness; if a mass shooting hadn’t touched his life and taken others, Mr Fierro would never have been in DC this week.
“Even at the congressman’s office, one of the staff goes, ‘It’s amazing to meet you guys -- but it’s really horrible that we’re meeting.”
What Mr Fierro is focused on now is encouraging unity, bravery and swift action; he calls to mind the national pulling together that followed September 11, another tragedy that altered the course of his life.
“9/11, to me, was a defining moment for my family, because it changed our service to our country,” he tells The Independent. “We had joined the army just to kind of go through that process but never expected to go to war. And we did that for the next 10 years following 9/11. So those moments, America can unite, but it shouldn’t take those kind of moments.”
After previously taking his family to 9/11 memorials in DC and New York, he was touched when a young staffer at the Capitol pointed out the memorial to Flight 93, which had been headed towards the Capitol before passengers and crew courageously took on the hijackers. The aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania, killing all on board.
“That really resonated with me,” after visiting the other memorials, he says. “That was like that final piece. To see the Flight 93 memorial for me was like, ‘This is what changed my life and sent me to war.’ And America united for at least five, six years, ten years, and nobody cared, they just wanted to make sure that we were good, and nobody let violence change their activity.
“And I think that’s kind of where we need to go back,” he tells The Independent. “It wasn’t that long ago. Twenty years ago, you know, we all kind of came together and said: We will not stand for this. And I think that’s kind of where things might need to go again.”
