Who’s Grooming “Lone Wolf” Terrorists?
Colorado Springs Shooter Avoided Red Flag Law
Late Saturday night a gunman entered the LGBTQ+ oriented Club Q in Colorado Springs with a long rifle plus a reported six magazines of backup ammo, and immediately began shooting patrons. Five people are dead, and another 25 are injured.
More people would have been shot were it not for two club patrons tackling and disarming the shooter. Police officers arrived and took the suspected gunman into custody within six minutes of receiving an emergency call about the shooting.
The Club Q shooting comes after more than a year of conservative politicians and commentators demonizing the LGBTQ+ community and holding often violent protests against drag events. The Proud Boys are acting as the morals police, trying to start fights and being nasty little fascists.
Hours before the mass shooting, Club Q posted on Facebook about a planned “all ages drag brunch” on Sunday morning. The event was described by the club as a celebration of the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors the memory of transgender people who lost their lives to anti-transgender violence.
The word “groomers” has become an all-purpose pejorative term used by the right. Lurking in the small minds of these haters is the notion of non-straight people having a need to cultivate humans for the purpose of sexual pleasure. The current usage has a pedigree going back to former beauty queen Anita Bryant’s 1977 Save Our Children campaign.
"What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life," she warned.
"As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children," she said, adding, "If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters."
Republicans, under the same guise of promoting parental rights and curriculum transparency, have expanded their denigration of public schools beyond lies about Critical Race Thoeory, weaponizing the word “grooming” to condemn the LGBTQ+ community and erase any mention of sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. Baselessly accusing queer and trans people of pedophilia in order to push forward an anti-LGBTQ+ political agenda is far from new, but its recent reiteration has spread like wildfire.
This how stochastic terrorism has always worked: Announce and identify the target with eliminationist rhetoric, and then let random actors inspired by the surrounding hateful rhetoric conduct the acts of violence it’s intended to inspire. Statistically predictable, but individually unpredictable.
It should surprise exactly nobody that the latest mass shooter picked an LGBTQ+ establishment. We’re all swimming in a sea of hate these days, as “otherizing” is a pillar of right wing politics.
Right-wing media has been perpetuating these myths, with Fox News hosts like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson conflating grooming — which refers to the manipulation and sexual exploitation of minors — with the mere acknowledgment of queer and trans people.
Ingraham aired a whole segment on the topic, accusing liberals of “sexually grooming elementary students” and “peddling gender ideology,” and Carlson suggested that teachers who talk to students about sexual orientation and gender identity should be arrested and beaten up.
Former Mississippi gubernatorial candidate Robbert Foster told the Mississippi Free Press that “the law should be changed so that anyone trying to sexually groom children and/or advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty.”
From the Colorado Times Recorder:
”This year has seen nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced across the country, the bulk of them targeting transgender people’s access to gender-affirming health care, ability to participate in school sports, and in Oklahoma, to use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity.”
“The moral panic over the existence of transgender people has manifested itself in a renewed interest by conservatives in drag queen events, rekindling the performative hand-wringing and protesting of 2018.”
I’m not going to share the shooter’s first name, but I do want to point out the San Diego connection, namely that he’s the grandson of Second Amendment fetishist and now former Assemblyman Randy Voepel.
From Heavy.com:
. There were calls to expel Voepel from the state Assembly after he made comments comparing the January 6 attacks to the Revolutionary War. Aldrich’s mother, Laura Voepel, has written posts praising Randy Voepel on Facebook and confirming he is her father.
“This is Lexington and Concord. First shots fired against tyranny,” Randy Voepel, who was defeated in a Republican primary in August 2022, said in a San Diego Union-Tribune article three days after January 6. “Tyranny will follow in the aftermath of the Biden swear-in on January 20th.” According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Voepel “later tweeted that he condemned violence and lawlessness.” Voepel and his office did not immediately respond to requests for comments from Heavy.
The shooter was arrested in 2021 after his mother reported he threatened her with a homemade bomb and other weapons. Despite the fact that there was an hours-long standoff with police, prosecutors did not pursue any charges and records of the arrest were sealed. Maybe they played his White Privilege card.
From Politico:
Gun control advocates say Aldrich’s June 2021 threat is an example of a red flag law ignored, with potentially deadly consequences. While it’s not clear the law could have prevented Saturday night’s attack — such gun seizures can be in effect for as little as 14 days and be extended by a judge in six-month increments — they say it could have at least slowed Aldrich and raised his profile with law enforcement.
I’m sure the words “lone wolf” will get tossed around in describing this mass shooting, which was the 600th mass shooting in calendar year 2022, according to the Washington Post.
As it just so happens, the New York Times had an excellent editorial this weekend: There Are No Lone Wolves
It’s unfortunate that the term “lone wolf” has come into such casual use in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. It aims to describe a person — nearly always a man — who is radicalized to violence but unconnected to an organized terrorist group like Al Qaeda. But it is wrong to think about violent white supremacists as isolated actors.
There are formal white supremacist organizations going by names like Atomwaffen Division (Canada, Germany, Italy, Britain, United States), Honor and Nation (France), the All-Polish Youth (Poland). But while the majority of adherents to the white supremacist cause aren’t directly affiliated with these groups, they describe themselves as part of a global movement of like-minded people, some of whom commit acts of leaderless violence in the hopes of winning more adherents and destabilizing society.
The atomized nature of the global white extremist movement has also obscured the public’s understanding of the nature of their cause and led to policy prescriptions that aren’t enough to address the scope of the threat. Thoughts and prayers alone will not solve the problem, nor will better mental health care, important though all those things are. One missing piece of any solution is acknowledging that right-wing extremist violence in the United States is part of a global phenomenon and should be treated that way.
The Times editorial is good as far as it goes, but fails to recognize the influence of far right groups in law enforcement. And since violence is always bubbling under the surface with extremist groups, having cops willing to look the other way while crimes are being committed is a recipe for disaster. And, yes, this is a problem with both the San Diego Police Department and the San Diego Sheriff's Office.
Some entities even defend those associations, like the Minnesota Police Unions and Law Enforcement officials who oppose rules banning cops from being involved in extremist groups as a minimum condition for employment in the state.
From the Minnesota Reformer:
In fact, the proposed rule was prompted by a FBI report, released in 2020, warning about the infiltration of violent white supremacist ideology in law enforcement. As Michael German, a former FBI agent, wrote in the Guardian, “Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia, among other states.
Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist, and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common. The proposed rules did get support from advocates of police reform.
What’s the solution to the problem of stochastic violence encouraged by the right’s propaganda campaigns?
First, the rhetoric that walks right up to the dividing line between activism and armed actions needs to be called out. Canceled, even. If the Tucker Carlsons of the world become social pariahs, if corporations have the common sense to not enable their platforms, if religious and civic leaders shun these types, the message will get through eventually.
Second, the lies must be refuted every time they get repeated. And we don’t have to repeat the lies. Somebody blathering about “grooming” in schools should be challenged to name names, cite arrests, and asked what they're doing to help the “victims.”
Third, we need common sense gun safety rules. Americans overwhelmingly support background checks and steps to keep guns out of the hands of obvious bad guys.
Again, the lies are determining the discourse and the zeitgeist. I’m sure somewhere in the bowels of NRA headquarters there’s somebody in chat mode with an Alex Jones-type encouraging rumors saying these dead bar patrons are a “false flag” designed to take guns away from people.
The people who died in Colorado Springs need to be humanized. Let’s tell their stories so they’re not just statistics.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com
Lead image background via Elisabeth Parker