Club Q Shooter Evaded “Red Flag” Law After Authorities Declined To Enforce

A year and a half before Anderson Lee Aldrich entered a gay nightclub and proceeded to murder 5 people and injure 25 more, he allegedly threatened his mother with a homemade bomb causing neighbors to evacuate their homes as experts negotiated his surrender. Following the incident, it appears that prosecutors never charged him with any crime. Doing so would have triggered Colorado’s “red flag” law which might have kept weapons out of his hands. CNN obtained video footage of Aldrich surrendering to police at the end of the alleged bomb threat. Below is the media release from the sheriff’s office about the incident. https://youtu.be/56jyC2bkoFo From the Associated Press:

Yet despite that scare, there’s no record prosecutors ever 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.

El Paso County appears especially hostile to the law. It joined nearly 2,000 counties nationwide in declaring themselves “Second Amendment Sanctuaries” that protect the constitutional right to bear arms, passing a 2019 resolution that says the red flag law “infringes upon the inalienable rights of law-abiding citizens” by ordering police to “forcibly enter premises and seize a citizen’s property with no evidence of a crime.”

In 2019, El Paso County Sheriff Bill Elder told the press he didn’t support red flag laws and his office wouldn’t pursue using them. El Paso Country District Attorney Michael Allen, a “law and order” Republican, did not respond when asked why he chose not to prosecute Aldrich in 2021. Read the full report here. https://twitter.com/j_rplacitas/status/1594701900481409024 https://twitter.com/AP/status/1594531999854772224