An attacker opened fire in a nightclub late Saturday, killing five people and wounding 18, officials said. The club said the gunman was subdued by patrons.
Authorities received a report of a shooting at Club Q at 11:57 p.m. and responded within minutes, said Lt. Pamela Castro of the Colorado Springs Police Department.
The violence is the sixth mass killing this month and comes in a year when the nation was shaken by the deaths of 21 in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Castro had few details beyond the number of dead and wounded. She said the suspect was injured but didn’t know how and that the FBI was on the scene and assisting.
The police department planned a news conference for 8 a.m. (10 a.m. EST) on the investigation.
“Club Q is devastated by the senseless attack on our community,” the club posted on its Facebook page. It said its prayers were with victims and families, adding: “We thank the quick reactions of heroic customers that subdued the gunman and ended this hate attack.”
Club Q is geared toward those with “alternative lifestyles.”
Club Q’s Facebook page said planned entertainment for Saturday included a “punk and alternative show” preceding a birthday dance party, with a Sunday “all ages brunch.”
Colorado Springs is a city of about 480,000 located about 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of Denver that is home to the U.S. Air Force Academy.
In November 2015, three people were killed and eight wounded at a Planned Parenthood clinic in the city when authorities say a man opened fire because he wanted to wage “war” on the clinic because it performed abortions.
The motive behind Saturday’s shooting was not immediately known but it brought back memories of the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people. And it occurred in a state that has experienced several notorious mass killings, including at Columbine High School in 1999, a movie theater in suburban Denver in 2012 and at a Boulder supermarket last year.
In June, 31 members of the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front were arrested in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and charged with conspiracy to riot at an alternative lifestyle event.
There have been 523 mass killings since 2006 resulting in 2,727 deaths as of Nov. 19, according to The Associated Press/USA Today database on mass killings in the U.S.
(AP/YWN)
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The motive behind Saturday’s shooting was not immediately known but it brought back memories of the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people.
That example should be enough to remind people not to speculate ahead of the information. In that case we all remember what happened. For a month we were inundated with lectures about how this was the result of “hate speech” and “phobia”, and it was all the fault of those who upheld religion and the traditional attitudes. And then we found out that לא דובים ולא יער, the whole thing had nothing to do with any of that.
The Pulse massacre was an act of Moslem terrorism, pure and simple. The people who were killed there died not because of anything about their lifestyle but only because they were American. The terrorist didn’t even know what kind of place he had chosen. He chose it at random after seeing that his original target, Disney World, had too much security. So all the lectures were for nothing.
Let’s be careful not to make the same mistake here.
Colorado Blue 🟦🥶🔵🥶🟦🥶🔵🥶🟦 state