Colorado Club Shooting Suspect Is Non-Binary And Uses They/Them Pronouns

Bit of a plot twist regarding the suspect in the mass shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub last weekend; public defenders for the killer state in a court filing obtained by the NY Times that their client is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.

Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, is facing multiple murder and hate crime charges over the shooting at Club Q that killed five people – Daniel Davis Aston, Kelly Loving, Ashley Paugh, Derrick Rump and Raymond Green Vance (pictured below). Things could’ve been even worse if two patrons hadn’t bravely tackled Aldrich, including U.S. Army veteran Richard Fierro, who wounded the suspect with his own gun.

According to the NY Post, the shooter changed his name two weeks before his 16th birthday in 2015, from Nick Brink to Anderson Lee Aldrich. This was to distance himself from his dad; a drug addict who worked in the porn industry.

Now it could be that this ‘non-binary’ claim is a sneaky ploy to get around hate crime charges, even if this person is going to jail for the rest of their lives regardless. Could be that the shooter is part of the LGBT community and holds a far right ideology, unlikely as that might sound.

Either way – I think reasonable people can agree on one thing and that’s that America really needs to sort out its gun problem. As is so often the case with these mass shootings, Aldrich used an AR-15 during the attack. Whatever his motive or ideology, the average person should not be able to get their hands on a weapon that can cause this amount of damage in such a small window of time. How many more mass shootings will the US have to endure before they figure that out?