Colorado Nightclub Shooting: Advice for Moving Forward

I’ve been following the story of the Club Q nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs, and it is absolutely heartbreaking. I’m very appreciative of how the mainstream press and the LGBTQ+ community are handling it. I’m especially glad to hear that some of the patrons stopped the killer; the bravery of those individuals saved lives by resolving the situation much more quickly than would have been possible if they had waited for the police.

The preferred enemy for the far right has most recently been people who are trans, and they’ve been purposefully conflating transness with both drag and “grooming” (pedophilia). In essence, they’ve declared all three things to be one and the same; in truth, they are entirely separate and distinct from one another and only one of those three things (pedophilia) is evil. As GLAAD CEO and President Sarah Kate Ells pointed out in an interview on MSNBC, these false narratives are part of an environment of violence and hate that makes mass murder events like what happened in Colorado Springs inevitable. Genocidal right-wing narratives have driven an increase in documented hate crimes not only for LGBTQ+ people, but also Asian and Jewish people. The list of the far-right’s enemies is a lot longer than that, though, and it ends up covering just about everyone.

I’d like to talk about practical approaches to this problem because it isn’t going away anytime soon. As members of this club have said many times before, it is going to get worse.

First of all, the police are not the answer.

  1. To have enough police to cover every potential target of right-wing violence is not possible, and as a result, when seconds count, the police will almost always be minutes away. This part, at least, is not their fault. The mere existence of police does not prevent violence; police can only react to violence (or start it themselves).
  2. Police tend to be toward the far right politically; i.e., they are frequently part of the problem. This can create subtle changes in the speed and quality of their response that have a very significant impact in terms of lives lost. Specifically, the police will rarely care about a marginalized group of people as much as members of that community care about it. The ideas police have regarding who the good guys and bad guys are likely make them less motivated to risk their lives to save members of marginalized communities. It is entirely possible to call the police and have them attack the wrong side as as result of their prejudices.
  3. Sometimes, the police simply don’t care to risk their lives even if it seems like the people affected would inspire them to do so (e.g., Uvalde). The police have absolutely no obligation (legally speaking) to serve or protect the community.

The phrase “we keep us safe” has a lot of layers and nuance, but in this context it means that the best people to take on the responsibility of minimizing a firearm-related terrorist attack are members of the community who are physically present at the potential site of an attack. If you are the organizer for an event or location that serves people who have been the subject of the right wing’s genocidal propaganda, it is my strong recommendation that you identify members of the community who are willing to volunteer as anti-terrorist security.

Anti-terrorist security is very different from normal event security. They are not acting as an authority figure for the event or location; e.g., they are not taking tickets or money, they are not preventing people from bringing in their own food/drink, and they are not addressing a normal belligerent patron. Their only purpose is to stop terrorists. Where a bouncer might wear a uniform that points out their authority, someone performing anti-terrorist security is better off blending in. (Anyone wearing a uniform is in more danger because they are likely to be the first targets of a terrorist.)

Should your community’s anti-terrorist security be armed? That would depend on the exact details of your strategy. Sure, yes — it is true that it is easier for a person armed with a gun to stop someone with a gun than it is for an unarmed person to do it. Depending on the details of the situation, it might not even be possible for an unarmed person to stop a killer with a gun. However, I also think there is great value in refusing to compromise your ethics based on what your enemies might do, and I think it is entirely possible to come up with adequately effective strategies that do not require your anti-terrorist security to be armed.

In either case, it is important to develop and implement that strategy and to not depend on the police solving the problem for you. In the long term, the goal would be to end fascism, but with nearly half of Americans (i.e., Republicans) actively participating in it and another near half (i.e., Democrats) going between merely ridiculing them and negotiating with them, there’s little indication that fascism will end in our lifetimes.

If you are in the Boone County area, we may be available to provide your group with a free workshop on disarming an active shooter so that your volunteers can be more effective in that situation.

Update:

The New York Times has an interview with Richard M. Fierro, who was the first person to attack the mass shooter at Club Q in Colorado Springs. (Fierro was soon backed up by a woman who has not been identified.) Fierro runs a brewery, but also served 15 years in the US Army. The interview basically confirms the practical advice I provided above. Due to his military experience (and trauma), Fierro always watches the door of any public location, ready to respond to an attack. In a situation where seconds or even parts of a second matter, I think it is worthwhile to talk about how to reduce that response time, even if only by a tiny bit, and I think having at least one more person primed to respond and explicitly giving those two people the responsibility to stop the shooter might have done just that. But keep in mind that once you’ve got a psychopathic murderer with a gun in the room with a crowd of people, there’s no success per se; there’s only minimizing losses at that point.