Colorado Springs police, the FBI and others investigate the scene of a shooting at Club Q on Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022 in Colorado Springs, Colo. An attacker opened fire in a gay nightclub late Saturday night. (Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via AP)

What does someone have to do in Colorado Springs to be arrested, prosecuted and tossed in jail? A lot, it seems, but making a bomb threat that results in the evacuation of a neighborhood and being charged with felony kidnapping aren’t enough to bring the law down on you.

Colorado Springs’ criminal element has surely taken note.

The piece of human detritus that opened fire in the Club Q gay nightclub Saturday night and murdered five people was no stranger to local law enforcement. As the AP reports . . .

A year and a half before he was arrested in the Colorado Springs gay nightclub shooting that left five people dead, Anderson Lee Aldrich allegedly threatened his mother with a homemade bomb, forcing neighbors in surrounding homes to evacuate while the bomb squad and crisis negotiators talked him into surrendering.

Yet despite that scare, there’s no public record that prosecutors moved forward with felony kidnapping and menacing charges against Aldrich, or that police or relatives tried to trigger Colorado’s “red flag” law that would have allowed authorities to seize the weapons and ammo the man’s mother says he had with him.

Those are some terribly inconvenient facts that aren’t being allowed to get in the way of a torrent of calls from politicians and gun control advocates as they — once again — waive the bloody shirt and call for more gun control laws.

Take, for example, whoever it is in the White House that writes and issues statements in the name of Joe Biden.

…yet another community in America has been torn apart by gun violence. More families left with an empty chair at the table and hole in their lives that cannot be filled. When will we decide we’ve had enough? We must address the public health epidemic of gun violence in all of its forms. Earlier this year, I signed the most significant gun safety law in nearly three decades, in addition to taking other historic actions. But we must do more. We need to enact an assault weapons ban to get weapons of war off America’s streets. 

And of course . . .

Yet Aldrich clearly broke a range of laws back in 2021, some of them felonies that should have landed him behind bars and would have have made it illegal for him to own or possess firearms under current gun control laws. And no, we don’t have any illusions about the effectiveness of that prohibition, but if his ass had been in the county lockup, it wouldn’t have been in Club Q on Saturday night.

Meanwhile, the local powers that be seem to be doing everything they possibly can to avoid questions about why Aldrich was never prosecuted.

The county sheriff’s office declined to answer what happened after Aldrich’s arrest last year, including whether anyone asked to have his weapons removed. The press release issued by the sheriff’s office at the time said no explosives were found but did not mention anything about whether any weapons were recovered.

Spokesperson Lt. Deborah Mynatt referred further questions about the case to the district attorney’s office.

An online court records search did not turn up any formal charges filed against Aldrich in last year’s case. And in an update on a story on the bomb threat, The Gazette newspaper of Colorado Springs reported that prosecutors did not pursue any charges in the case and that records were sealed.

Never mind all that, though. As far as anyone in government and the media are concerned, Saturday’s atrocity is yet another example of why America has too many guns and Americans have too many rights to own and carry them. They’re not about to let a crisis go to waste, no matter what the facts of what’s happened in Colorado Springs over the last 18 months may be.

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72 COMMENTS

    • No, but his mother and grandfather were crazy right wing insurrection supporters.

      How strange that this TTAG article does not mention that fact.

      “California MAGA Republican Assemblyman Randy Voepel is the grandfather of Colorado Springs shooting suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich, according to media reports.

      Colorado Springs police arrested Aldrich, 22, following a mass shooting at the LGBT venue Club Q on Saturday that left five people dead and 25 were injured.

      Multiple media reports, including The San Diego Union-Tribune, showed Aldrich’s mother is Laura Voepel, daughter of the 72-year-old California state assemblyman.

      Just three days after the riot, Randy Voepel told the Union-Tribune: “This is Lexington and Concord. First shots fired against tyranny.”

      “Tyranny will follow in the aftermath of the [Joe] Biden swear-in on January 20.”

      It seems crazy begins at home…

      https://www.newsweek.com/colorado-springs-lgbtq-club-shooting-live-updates-least-5-dead-1761080

      • minor49iq…Climb down from your high horse democRat and talk about the bozos with politics like yours who shot up a ballgame between Republicans and democRats where Rats were spared the carnage.

        From slavery to lynching to Eugenics to ted kennedy leaving a woman to drown to perverts like anthony weiner you should know by now you democRat Party lint lickers have no podium. Frankly you are just as wacky as the perp but on a different plane.

        • He’s just a card carrying prog moron. Horses have nothing to do with it.

          The continual negro history in the US is a losing argument. Try another.

        • “My grandpa hated Herbert Hoover- me – meh.”

          My grandpa hated Leftist Scum ™, and so do I… 🙂

      • Oh yes, right wing sentiments forced this guy to violence. Political violence is only one sided. I’ve never heard of, say, someone on the left trying to assassinate a Supreme Court justice or a leftist trying to gun down (R) lawmakers at ballpark, or a leftist president describing half the country as the enemy, a leftist member of Congress calling for people to “stay on the streets” and “get more confrontational” during the summer of lovefires and lovesmashed windows (called today’s Boston Tea Party by Don Lemon, since you’re such a scholar of Revolutionary analogies), etc.

        Let’s assume January 6 was the darkest day in planet earth’s history, an event for which Miner49er lights a candle on the monthly anniversary, despite it being no more than a weirdo in a Viking hat sitting in a chair after being invited in by the very people allegedly guarding the building. For some idiotic reason, you subscribe to the theory that the grandfather imparts upon the grandson to begin The New Revolution, almost three years after New Lexington & Concord, in a gay club 1,700 miles from where the alleged first battle began. The Colorado front of this war must be really important for some reason, although, our psychotic, murdering friend doesn’t seem to care about coordinating himself to the start of the New Revolution, as it took him a year and a half to threaten to kill his mother by blowing up the house, which we all know is exactly how George Washington got his start.

        Keep up the great work, do you have any YouTube lectures I can learn more about all this?

        • The American progs don’t believe in sin but now will impute the “sin” of a grandparent onto a grandchild. “Very Interesting”. Perhaps this should be examined further.

      • Everybody knows kids rebel against their parents politics.

        Hence the conservative cringe over sending their kids to college.

        You me and the 12 other Miner49ers are reading the same talking points sheets we got. This one about hereditary politics is always bullshit. I wish they’d stop including it. Don’t tell the supervisor. I need this job

      • Careful if you point out that it was a Muslim a whacko liberal everyone on here will say it’s fake. Although reading some of the comments I think the shooter will find supporters on here.

        • “Although reading some of the comments I think the shooter will find supporters on here“

          No doubt, there are already many comments on here supporting the attack on the club because of the patrons.

          Of course, they’re just following their dark gid’s instructions to murder.

      • What is really interesting is the comment that the records were sealed. That says to me that law enforcement, including the DA were using the shooter as some kind of informant. I suspect he was being used to infiltrate “patriot” groups on behalf of not the local law enforcement but the federales. The “Justice” Department has a lot of influence in getting local law enforcement to cooperate in maintaining criminals on the street that the federales are using in some manner or other. During the wide open crack cocaine days in Los Angeles it was the federales, most particularly the “Justice” Department who managed to get notorious drug and arms dealers sprung from jail and not prosecuted with the arrest and other records mysteriously disappearing. While I can’t claim first hand knowledge of such, I do know that locally the cops would get an undercover informant accidentally swept up off with continued probation and sentenced to time served awaiting disposition so that he or she could continue on the streets with “street creds”. I also have read extensively about how the “Justice” Department performed similar miracles only with much higher level criminals than the local “law enforcement” folk. We have one local felon who has been busted four times with a loaded handgun in his possession. Is he languishing in state or federal prison? Well, if he were, he probably wouldn’t have been busted four times. Each time he has been continued on probation. How does that happen with a DA who promised to crack down on street crime to get elected? And, who continues to talk about being tough on street crime while in office.

  3. Funny they holler and moan about “all dem gunnnzzzz” “out there” but fail to acknowledge that THIS clown SHOULD have been debarred the use/possession of arms based on prior felony charges,NOR do they acknowledge the action by the one armee citizen who stopped the mayhem this time

    Can’t have it both ways.
    One more incident where a gun in th e WRONG (and known to be wrong) hands was stopped ay ANOTHER GUN in GOOD hands.

    • Perhaps the records were sealed to avoid stigmatizing the perp and affecting future employment prospects.

    • “stopped ay ANOTHER GUN in GOOD hands“

      Yes, but he used the handgun to beat the shit out of the murderer, so it’s not exactly what you’re thinking.

      • Yes it was a suboptimal situation, now lets suppose that there were the option to carry and it was exercised for an even greater potential chance of stopping the incident before more victims were harmed.

  5. FYI

    Only when we as a society admit that the mentally ill must be forced into treatment and monitored. Possibly for the rest of their natural lives. Only then will we reduce the number of criminal acts committed by the mentally ill.

    And we have been here before. I have not forgotten the Joyce Brown case from New York City. Back in the 1980s. When the Libertarians liberals on the Left and the ACLU. Helped to make this problem much worse.

    From 1986

    Joyce Patricia Brown

    “In 1985, her sisters took her to East Orange General Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, where she was diagnosed as psychotic, was treated with antipsychotic medications, and was put in restraints after attempting assaults on the staff. In May, 1986, after an argument, she left her sisters’ home and apparently became homeless.”

    “after a series of incidents which purportedly included running into traffic, exposing herself to passersby, making threats, tearing up and urinating on money that passersby gave her, and covering herself in her own excrement.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Patricia_Brown

    • I don’t like using Wikipedia as a source. However much of this information is accurate. Based on other things that I have read about this case over the years. The bottom line is that once she was able to refuse treatment she was back on the streets. Once again urinating and defecating on herself. And causing problems for passersby. Like so many other homeless people do.

      She passed away several years ago.

  6. We should all understand that this is all part of the plan. Criminals are to be caught and released to commit more crimes. This will (they hope) result in more crime and therefore more support for “Gun (People) Control”.

    The problem for the DemoRats is we are 100% wise to this game and only the Woke Dopes are going to fall for these lies. This is just more proof that these Communists only care about their power and never about people.

  7. While not the least bit surprising the important aspect of this that has not yet been reported is the names of the heroes who fought this loser and won. They should given medals, made grand marshals of parades, and never have to buy their own beer so long as they live.

    • Personally, I’m hoping it was a couple buff lumberjacks and some leather lover daddies who got a hold of him before the police arrived.

      Unfortunately, it’s likely that his Republican legislator grandpa will get him out of this trouble just like he has before.

      In any case, my bet is that he is adjudicated mentally ill and never serves a day in prison, instead enjoying a comfortable retirement at ‘Sunny Acres’, just like Rodney Bruce Black Who murdered two innocent elderly African-Americans with his sniper rifle in 2014.

      • You are correct, here is an excellent interview. This gentleman stepped forward and saved some lives that night.

        https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OkZbbLRK-3c

        I believe this is the gentleman who put the perpetrator in the hospital, he grabbed him from behind by his body armor and slammed him down.
        It seems that subject lost his grip on his AR 15 when he went down, then the major took his pistol away from him and beat him with it.

  9. We will continue to have these problems as long as national and state Republican politicians continue to cut mental health funding at every opportunity:

    “How Trump’s Budget Will Affect People with Mental Health Conditions”

    “Reduces funding for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment Programs of Regional and National Significance by ~$600 million.
    Discontinues funding for the Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment program.”

    https://mhanational.org/blog/how-trumps-budget-will-affect-people-mental-health-conditions

    “Gov. Abbott has been governor since 2015, and since then, there have been roughly 13 mass shooting events in his state. Yet he has done nothing to expand access to mental health care. Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the country, with 17.3 percent of its population without health insurance. This is roughly twice the national average. Furthermore, Texas also has the most uninsured children in the country—roughly 1 million. Mental Health America rated the state dead last for overall access to mental health services.

    But Gov. Abbott hasn’t just failed to expand access to health coverage; he has actively cut it. In April he slashed $211 million from the Department of Health and Human Services and redirected it to border security, and this despite the fact the state has a record surplus, in part from federal funding allocated by the American Rescue Plan Act.

    Worse, there has been an easy solution available to Gov. Abbott the entire time he has been in office: Texas could expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act and reduce the number of uninsured Texans by almost 1.5 million adults, roughly a third of the uninsured population. Though many children are already eligible for health insurance but not enrolled, as the state enrolled their parents, it would also cover their children.“

    https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-are-blaming-mental-health-school-shootings-after-refusing-fund-it-opinion-1711186?amp=1

    • Texans voted down Beato & Gun Control……and don’t like freeloaders.
      Super-Wealthy California has the highest poverty rate in the Nation.

  10. Pastor at sheet head’s LDS church apparently made some sort of call for use of “muskets” to deal with LBGTQ+ issues.
    His MAGA Grandfather is rumored to have helped keep the threats against his mom sealed by police, enabling pudding’ belly to buy or keep weapons.
    All this punching down by politicians, clergy and entertainers on citizens who have little power like the queer folks just amps up the kooks.

  11. “if his ass had been in the county lockup, it wouldn’t have been in Club Q on Saturday night”

    sure. but you can say that about anything. and the left has all sorts of reasons to lock YOU up.

  12. I’m surprised they didn’t charge this white boy in 2021. Usually absurd clemency is only granted to the duskier skinned among us.

  13. “Pastor at sheet head’s LDS church apparently made some sort of call for use of “muskets” to deal with LBGTQ+ issues.
    His MAGA Grandfather is rumored to have helped keep the threats against his mom sealed by police, enabling pudding’ belly to buy or keep weapons“

    No doubt the shooter was mentally ill, but was the clergyman who directed him to use his “musket” to deal with the LGBTQ also crazy?

    Or was that Mormon pastor just a devout man of God, delivering his Word to the sheep who knew to follow the Lord’ Word?

    Yep, and once again religion is used to justify killing innocent people.

    I pray Lord Jesus, deliver me from your followers.

    • “but was the clergyman who directed him to use his ‘musket’ to deal with the LGBTQ also crazy?”

      dunno, is the bible crazy?

      • “dunno, is the bible crazy?”

        Ever notice how this argument only ever takes place when speaking of the Bible as being literally true?

        Strange how the Bible contains loads of stories that are remarkably similar to old fables and other ancient religions yet no one ever goes all anti-Ra or anti-Zeus about it claiming those stories to be crazy.

        Kinda funny how some things are metaphors while some things are literal truths and people pick and choose which to apply based on the argument they’re trying to make.

        Yet regardless of which ancient religion from that general geographic area you pick they all tend to tell the same stories again and again and again. Which might be why academic Lefties don’t like Egyptology but the rank and file, who falsely claim to be educated, completely ignore it.

        The best part is the built-in assumption (especially ironic on the Left side of the arguments) that God would speak plainly to humans as if we could understand such a being and he could just tell us and we’d get it.

        • “Strange how the Bible contains loads of stories that are remarkably similar to old fables and other ancient religions”

          Oh Lordy, S9 you are going straight to hell!

          Didn’t you get the memo, you are not supposed to point out the facts of the situation, can’t you just sit down and sing your hymns and donate to the collection plate so the preacher can buy a new Gulfstream V.

    • “once again religion is used to justify killing innocent people”

      for the left, if you’re not one of them, then you’re not innocent at all and can be killed righteously regardless of anything you’ve done or not done. pol pot, 3 million. lenin/stalin, 40 million. mao, 80 million. antifa – just getting warmed up.

      • That’s not a religion. That’s a “rational ideology” that replaces the religious impulse.

        It is infinitely more dangerous because it contains zero attempts at moderation but rather seeks to justify goal-seeking, essentially, for the purpose of goal-seeking. (And not in the “I sorta know how to use Excel” goal-seeking way.)

  14. “We must address the public health epidemic of gun violence in all of its forms.”

    The real “public health epidemic” is an ever growing percentage of the population who rejects classical/orthodox Judeo-Christian values.

    If you reject the notion of an Almighty God Creator who defines timeless truths and right-versus-wrong standards, then you have no truth and no standards–quite literally anything goes according to whatever whimsical thought or teaching comes along. That is the root problem in our society.

    Of course people will poo-poo or flat-out reject that pearl of wisdom which I just typed because it rains on their parade to do, well, whatever they desire.

    • “If you reject the notion of an Almighty God Creator who defines timeless truths and right-versus-wrong standards, then you have no truth and no standards“

      That is ridiculous drivel, mankind understood right and wrong, creating laws to govern society 1000 years before the beginning of Judeo Christian history.
      (The Code of Ur-Nammu of Ur.
      The Code of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin.
      The Laws of Eshnunna (written by Bilalama or by Dadusha)

      And the moral code you espouse permits slavery, literally owning people as property to be passed down to your children forever.

      Not to mention commanding his followers to murder men, women and children, but to save the virgin girl children for themselves (Numbers 31:17-18).

      Frankly, if you need the threat of an all-seeing father in heaven with the eternal fires of Hell in order to keep you in line, I have serious doubts about your own internal moral character.

    • Yeah, but you’re talking, by necessity, of some sort of hierarchical structure in thinking and society.

      And, as we all know, that’s bad. It leads to oppression and stuff.

      • Yes, most hierarchies are indeed less than favorable for the vast majority of the population.

        Especially when their authority is derived from an invisible sky daddy or mommy.

        “hierarchy
        noun
        hi·​er·​ar·​chy ˈhī-(ə-)ˌrär-kē, also ˈhi(-ə)r-ˌär-
        plural hierarchies
        1
        : a division of angels
        2
        a
        : a ruling body of clergy organized into orders or ranks each subordinate to the one above it
        especially : the bishops of a province or nation”
        b
        : church government by a hierarchy

    • “The real “public health epidemic” is an ever growing percentage of the population who rejects classical/orthodox Judeo-Christian values”

      actually, judaism and christianity have nothing in common. but otherwise, yeah.

  16. SHOULD HAVE , COULD HAVE , WILL HAVE , DID HAVE , CAN HAVE , , WHATEVER ,,
    O WISH A IF HAD , IT CIOULD HAVE BEEN A SHOULD HAVE …

  17. No big surprise the gunman (Aldrich) is the grandson of California state Assemblymember Randy Vopel, a pro-Trump Republican who likened the Jan. 6 insurrection that killed five to the Revolutionary War.

    The Republican Party has spent the last several months in particular escalating their attacks on queer and trans people. In addition to Aldrich’s ties to a far-right elected official who glorified violence on the Capitol, he has a documented history of violence—but obtained an AR-15 nonetheless.

    Whenever there is a mass murder against minorities chances are it is a far right fantac pulling the trigger and he usually uses a weapon of mass destruction i.e. the assault rifle.

  18. The only thing I’ve gleaned from this, given the coverage focusing on how the club was prepping for a transgender event is that you can fill a club with as many LGGBBDTTQQUIAAAAPPP2SNBGVGQGNC+ folks as you can find and end up with more balls than the entire Uvalde Police Department.

    • “more balls than the entire Uvalde Police Department“

      While the local police woman bear some responsibility, the 96 Texas state troopers from the DPS who sat on their hands are the real embarrassment.

      It seems Texas law-enforcement is all hat, no cattle.

      BTW, Major Fierro stated the perpetrator was wearing body armor, so his actual physical assault of the shooter may have been more effective than a handgun caliber defense from a CCW.

  19. The fact is that the guy was/is mentally ill. The other fact is that it was ignored, as well as the laws that he broke. Maybe one day we’ll stop blaming inanimate objects and focus on mental health as the culprit, but a lot more innocent people will have to die before that happens.

  20. Of course this guy was suject to the law and in America the law is part of an independent JUDICIARY or is supposed to be . Change the law by all means by due process but as far as I can see nothing this guy had done would have indicated that he was a MASS SHOOTER and you cannot just put all perpetrators of relatively minor crime inside because they ‘might’ at some point, maybe possibly, sort of shoot somebody.
    Everybody seems to have simple solutions to relatively complex questions with the benifit of hindsight but I bet my bottom dollar that if this guy had been banned from GUN OWNERSHIP on the basis of Crimes Commited you would be the first hypocrit to demand hs bloody rights under The Constitution.
    The fact is that in the vast majority of like cases there in no way that they could have been forecast OR prevented criminal past or not not least because ANYBODY, banned from ownership or not, with few hundred bucks in their pockets could get a SEMI-AUTO in a day.

    It’s the same with on-site security. A semi-skilled operator of reasonable intelligence with sufficient motivation WILL get through any on-site security that is affordable. Do not mistake a warped mind with an unintelligent one.

  21. There’s been a string of Mass Shootings just as El Presidente McSniffy Schitz-His-Pants calls for more Gun Control. Another Fat Fugly Incel, with obvious mental health issues shoots up a Gay Bar. He’s known to authorities, who in spight of the Laws on the books do Jack Schit to neutralize the threat he poses, even though Red Flag Laws are in place in Colorado, and touted to great success by the Liberals that run the State.

    Like many of these shootings, I’ve a strong suspicion this Blobtard was groomed. Too many things don’t appear coincidental.

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