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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. As of Tuesday morning, five people are dead and according to The New York Times, at least 13 remain hospitalized after a gunman stormed into an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs and open fire. Bystander Joshua Thurman was at Club Q on the night of the massacre. He spoke with The New York Times.
Joshua Thurman: Our community shattered. This is the only LGBTQIA+ space we have in the city of Colorado Springs. Where are we going to go?
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Melissa Harris-Perry: Where are we going to go? Joshua's question is a reminder of what was lost in this act of violence, lives and community shattered. This is not the first time. In 1973 an arsonist set fire to The Upstairs Lounge, a gay bar in New Orleans. More than 30 died in the blaze. In 2006, as they left the San Diego pride, six men were suddenly brutalized, beaten by baseball bats, stomped, stabbed. One of the assailants was just 15 years old. In 2013, 32-year-old Mark Carson was walking from a bar in the East Village and was accosted with anti-gay tirade before being shot in the face.
The number of Black trans women fatally assaulted is ticked up nearly every single year for a decade and of course, in 2016, 49 people died in the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting. On Monday, police release the names of the five lives lost on Saturday night in Colorado Springs. Derrick Rump was a bartender at Club Q. His sister Julia Kissling spoke with WFMZ 69 News.
Julia Kissling: He found a community of people that he loved really much and he felt that he could shine there and he did. He made a difference in sp many people's lives.
Melissa Harris-Perry: 35-year-old Ashley Paul worked for a nonprofit that helps place children in foster homes. She married her high school sweetheart, who said their 11-year-old daughter with her whole world. She was proud of Riley, who's a championship swimmer/ 22 year old Raman green Vance was at Club Q for a birthday party with his longtime girlfriend. He just started a job with FedEx and his family said, "He couldn't wait to save enough money to get his own apartment." In the meantime, he lived with his mother and younger brother who adored him.
Kelly Loving had recently moved to Denver and was visiting Colorado Springs for the weekend. Her friend Natalie Sky Bingham told The New York Times, "She was like a trans mother to me. I looked up to her. In the gay community you create your own families. It's like I lost my real mother almost.' 28-year-old Daniel Astin was a transgender man who had found his community in Colorado Springs. He spent the last two years working as a bartender and entertainer at Club Q.
Sabrina Astin: He was a showman. He was always an entertainer. You get this laugh at.
Melissa Harris-Perry: His parents, Sabrina and Jeff Astin spoke with Colorado Public Radio and talked about their concerns for his safety.
Sabrina Astin: I always worried about it. He's a trans man and the trans community are really the biggest targets I could think right now.
Jeff Astin: You to try not to think about those things too much.
Sabrina Astin: No.
Melissa Harris-Perry: This shooting took place late Saturday, in the last few minutes before Sunday's Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors the lives of transgender victims of violence. Earlier this month, the Human Rights Campaign reported that at least 32 trans and gender nonconforming people have been killed in the US far this year. At least two more names have now been added to this list.
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Speaker 2: Where are we going to go?
Melissa Harris-Perry: The 22-year-old suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich faces at least five counts of first degree murder and bias motivated crime and is currently being held without bond. This is not Aldrich's first encounter with law enforcement. In June of 2021, he threatened his mother with a homemade bomb and other weapons and questions are now being raised about why Colorado's red flag laws which are designed to provide early warnings about potentially dangerous perpetrators of violent crimes weren't activated. For more on all of this, I spoke Tuesday morning without Dr. Jonathan Metzl, Director of the Department of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, and an expert on gun policy.
Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Every day, and every moment we live in a country with more guns than people and with more mass shootings than days on the calendar. There was a lead-up to this particular and particularly horrific shooting where football players were killed on a bus and a college basketball game was evacuated because of an active shooter and countless shootings we never heard about in the news is really is in line with that quote we just heard from one of the survivors, where can you stay safe? Where can you feel safe? This feeling of safety, of communities coming together to feel safe. If you can't feel safe in a club around your friends or bus with your teammates, where can you feel safe? I really think that's the question that runs through my mind every time something like this happens, which unfortunately, as you say, is far, far too often.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I have a desire or concern about both wanting to talk about the lethal violence made possible by the guns, and to understand the motives. I guess part of what I'm wondering is that perhaps a human reaction, but a wrong policy or public reaction to say, "Wait a minute, was this an anti-LGBTQ action? Was this a mental health crisis?" Where should we balance trying to understand the motives versus the means?
Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Well, I think you're right. It's a natural human response to think about the motive. It's a natural human response to ask, I think truly an existential question, why would someone murder people they didn't know or someone they knew and had no problems with? Why would someone do that? I think that's just how our minds work in the aftermath of something like this. It's important for a legal perspective, what somebody's motive is very important in establishing criminality, which is, of course, a vital part of what happens after these shootings.
I would just say, as a psychiatrist, that this question of trying to first understand why somebody did this, and then go back up the chain and predict of people who meet these criteria, who will go on to commit something like this so maybe we can prevent it in the future, is unfortunately, as we're seeing, just at a policy level not effective. It's very hard to know which of the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who meet the criteria for what we deem to be a shooter in these instances will go on to kill somebody. It's very, very, very small and almost impossible to predict. Again, given the fact that there are many guns, it really does come back to questions of firearms, and what are the effective regulations we can think of around firearms that might help prevent this.
Melissa Harris-Perry: This public violence often begins first as domestic violence, as private violence, and that is precisely what these red flag laws are meant to address. What does this tell us potentially about the limitations of the red flag laws?
Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Well, red flag laws were put into place in many ways as a compromised position. There was just a lot of frustration on my side of what we might call the gun debate, push and pull between gun rights on one hand and public health based gun restrictions on the other. Certainly ideas that made sense in public health about background checks or assault weapons bans, other things like that, were increasingly non-starters. People settle on this idea of a restraining order. Basically, if somebody seems like they're escalating and they have firearms and their family realizes that they're escalating or authorities do, there's a way to temporarily limit their firearms for a period of two weeks up to up to six month.
Not in any way infringing on their Second Amendment rights on in a long-standing way, just really addressing an urgent crisis which oftentimes shootings are, and also, I should say, gun suicides are. Of course this, like every other policy, has been roundly critiqued, and in many instances rejected by gun rights people. They're very reluctant to even enforce these kind of rules. El Paso County has roughly a population of 730,000 and they had, I think, 13 temporary firearm removals through the end of last year. I also think there are issues with red flag laws, because what's the framework for somebody who has been escalating for their whole life to call authorities on that person by their relatives? I could see it being a tough call but I would also say that non-enforcement is really the biggest issue here.
Melissa Harris-Perry: As you're talking about this notion of enforcement and escalation to the point of calling authorities. All of that language, which in certain ways I recoil from, as someone who, we've talked about this here on The takeaway, trying to think about what it would mean to even be a student of abolition. I must admit that coming out of the midterm elections, where one of the central campaign discourse largely among Republican candidates was this idea of crime and yet gun control, lethal means were not on the table at all as a policy alternative. How do we square that? Is there any hope of altering that come 2024?
Dr. Jonathan Metzl: First, let me say that the majority of gun death never makes it to the news because at least two-thirds of gun death is gun suicide. We're not even talking about the major category of gun-related injury and death. Then I would just say I spend a lot of time in New York and watching the Zeldin campaign, for example, continually, continually beat the drum about random crime on the subway, but at the same time push for overturning New York's SAFE Act and long-standing gun laws and saying that everybody should be carrying a gun in a place like New York.
I can tell you as a gun scholar that that's going to lead to much more of the kinds of crime we've seen. There's really, truly an exponential and directly proportional relationship to the number of guns you pump into, particularly urban areas and different kinds of crime from homicide to theft. Really, what I think the GOP was doing was using particularly stereotyped racialized crime to open the floodgates for more guns, which would lead to more of the kind of problems we've seen. Now, I would say that this is a difficult question in relation to mass shootings.
I think there have been some good studies at the British Medical Journal and other places that show that states with relatively tight gun laws that are surrounded by states with other tight gun laws, in other words, states where it's harder to carry a gun in public, do tend to see fewer mass shootings than states where there are much more permissive gun laws. Gun laws are not irrelevant to mass shootings, but it's important to note that these are often so, so random and often unpredictable.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Dr. Jonathan Metzl is professor of sociology and psychiatry and director of the Center for Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University. As always, Jonathan, thanks for joining us.
Dr. Jonathan Metzl: Thanks so much. It's my honor.
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