There is no evidence as of yet for any specific political motive to the shooting.
Just before midnight on Saturday, a heavily armed gunman walked into Club Q in Colorado Springs and opened fire. He was disarmed and neutralized by patrons — including a heroic army veteran who “described charging through the chaos at the club, tackling the gunman and beating him bloody with the gunman’s own gun,” the New York Times reported — but not before he killed five people and injured 18 others. Like all mass shootings, it was an act of evil, motivated by the desire to take as many innocent lives as possible.
Whether the shooter targeted Club Q because it is an LGBT club is unknown. Indications are, though, that he was a profoundly sick man. In June 2021, he was arrested for allegedly threatening his mother “with a homemade bomb, multiple weapons, and ammunition,” according to a press release from the El Paso County sheriff’s office. It emerged on Tuesday that the shooter’s attorneys also describe him as “non-binary” and preferring “they/them pronouns.”
Nonetheless, left-wing activists and their allies in the press have been blaming the shooting on conservatives.
Club Q was an LGBT club “where families of all ages gathered for brunch on Sundays to watch drag performers,” the Washington Post reported.
According to the burgeoning conventional wisdom, therefore, the true culprits for the Club Q shooting include Libs of Tik Tok, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk’s Twitter content-moderation policies, the “right wing moral panic” about drag queen story hours, and — of course — the entire Republican Party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attributed the shooting to the Right’s “anti-LGBT+ campaign,” writing: “Connect the dots, @GOP.” Equality Florida press secretary Brandon Wolf told MSNBC that “right wing grifters, including politicians like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, they’ve been spewing this vile, hateful rhetoric about LGBTQ people . . . and we warned them that inevitably this would result in violence.” In the New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that the shooting “seems hard to separate” from the Right’s “nationwide campaign of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. incitement.” “Each time these things happen, the right-wing go-to is to blame ‘mental illness,’” Brian Broome wrote in the Washington Post. But “it’s right-wing rhetoric that sparks these nightmares.”
It is grotesque to lay the blame for this shooting at the feet of the millions of Americans who have legitimate questions about children being exposed to drag shows or undergoing irreversible sex-change surgeries. The idea that those questions are not just beyond the pale, but are affirmatively responsible for the murder of gay and transgender Americans, is a shameless attempt to gain an edge in an ongoing culture-war debate.
In 2017, a Tennessee woman attempted to run a Republican congressman off the road for his support for the GOP’s Obamacare replacement bill. A month later, a former Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer opened fire on a number of House Republicans, putting House whip Steve Scalise in the hospital for six weeks. Sanders had previously argued that if the GOP’s health-care bill passed, “thousands of Americans would die” — a claim echoed by numerous top Democrats. Are they responsible for the attempted murders of their partisan opponents? Of course not. From the 2012 shooting at the Family Research Council to the 2022 arrest of an armed assassin outside of Brett Kavanaugh’s house, political violence on the left is never seriously treated as the fruits of left-wing rhetoric.
The purveyors of this argument say that they are exasperated by calls to avoid politicization of such horrific events. “Do not politicize this tragedy? The tragedy is that you made our very existence political,” BuzzFeed’s David Mack wrote on Monday. “And if you want to own our lives, you must own our deaths too.” But criticism of, say, an adult drag queen gyrating before young children is not politicizing anyone’s “very existence.” Whatever else one might think about these specific cultural and political trends, they are new — and controversial. Debating how, or whether, they should be accommodated is not mass murder. It’s the deliberation of a free society.