A year and a half before he was arrested in the Colorado Springs gay nightclub shooting that left five people dead, Anderson Lee Aldrich allegedly threatened his mother with a homemade bomb, forcing neighbors in surrounding homes to evacuate while the bomb squad and crisis negotiators talked him into surrendering, the AP reports. Yet despite that scare, there’s no public record that prosecutors 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. The county sheriff’s office declined to answer what happened after Aldrich’s arrest last year, including whether anyone asked to have his weapons removed.
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. The law that allows guns to be removed from people deemed dangerous to themselves or others has seldom been used in the state. That's particularly true in El Paso County, home to Colorado Springs, where the 22-year-old Aldrich allegedly went into Club Q with a long gun just before midnight and opened fire before patrons hit him with his own gun and pinned him down.
An AP analysis found Colorado has one of the lowest rates of red flag usage despite widespread gun ownership and several high-profile mass shootings. Courts issued 151 gun surrender orders from when the law took effect in April 2019 through 2021, three surrender orders for every 100,000 adults in the state. That's a third of the ratio of orders issued for the 19 states and District of Columbia with surrender laws on their books. 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.”
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