DENVER (AP) — A year and a half before he was arrested in the Colorado Springs gay nightclub shooting that killed five people, Anderson Lee Aldrich allegedly threatened his mother with a homemade bomb, forcing neighbors in surrounding homes to evacuate while the bomb call and crisis negotiators persuaded him to surrender.
But despite that fear, no prosecutors have ever taken action with felony kidnapping and threatened charges against Aldrich, or that police or family members attempted to enact Colorado’s “red flag” law that would have allowed authorities to release the guns and ammunition in to confiscate, says the man’s mother. he had with him.
Gun control advocates say Aldrich’s June 2021 threat is an example of ignoring a red flag law, 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 only 14 days and extended by a judge in six-month increments — they say it could have at least delayed Aldrich and his profile with the police.
“We need heroes upfront — parents, colleagues, friends who see someone walking this path,” says Colorado state representative Tom Sullivan, whose son was killed in the shooting at the Aurora theater and sponsored the red flag bill passed in 2019 was adopted. “This should have alerted them, put him on their radar.”
But the law that allows guns to be taken from people deemed dangerous to themselves or others has rarely been used in the state, particularly in El Paso County, home to Colorado Springs, where 22-year-old Aldrich reportedly Q entered with a long gun just before midnight and opened fire before being subdued by patrons.
An Associated Press analysis found that Colorado has one of the lowest rates of red flag use, despite widespread gun ownership and several high-profile mass shootings.
Courts have issued 151 gun surrender orders from when the law went into effect in April 2019 through 2021, three surrender orders for every 100,000 adults in the state. That’s one-third of the orders issued for the 19 states and the District of Columbia with surrender laws on their books.
El Paso County seems particularly hostile to the law. It joined nearly 2,000 counties across the country in declaring themselves “Second Amendment Sanctuaries” that protect the constitutional right to bear arms, and passed a 2019 resolution stating that the red flag law “infringes the inalienable rights of law-abiding citizens” by ordering the police to “forcibly enter premises and seize any citizen’s property without evidence of a crime.”
County Sheriff Bill Elder has said his office would wait for relatives to ask a court for surrender warrants and not file a petition of their own accord unless there are “extensive circumstances” and “probable cause” of a crime.
El Paso County, with a population of 730,000, had 13 temporary firearm removals through the end of last year, four of which were longer lasting at least six months.
The county sheriff’s office declined to answer what happened after Aldrich’s arrest last year, including whether anyone asked to have their guns removed. The press release issued by the sheriff’s office at the time said no explosives were found, but said nothing about whether any weapons were recovered.
Spokeswoman Lieutenant Deborah Mynatt referred further questions about the case to the district attorney’s office.
An online search of court records turned up no formal charges against Aldrich in last year’s case. And in an update on a story about the bomb threat, the Colorado Springs newspaper The Gazette reported that prosecutors had not pressed charges in the case and that the files had been sealed.
The Gazette also reported on Sunday that it received a call from Aldrich in August asking it to remove a story about the incident.
“There is absolutely nothing, the case has been dropped and I’m asking that you delete or update the story,” Aldrich said in a voice message to an editor. “The whole case has been dropped.”
A spokesman for the district attorney’s office, Howard Black, declined to comment on any charges. He said the shooting investigation will also include an investigation into the bomb threat.
“No additional information will be released at this time,” Black said. “These are still research questions.”
AP’s study of 19 states and the District of Columbia with red flag laws on their books found that they’ve been used about 15,000 times since 2020, less than 10 times for every 100,000 adults in each state. Experts called that woefully low and barely enough to put a dent in gun killings.
This year, authorities in Highland Park, Illinois, were criticized for not attempting to take guns from the 21-year-old accused of a July 4 shooting that left seven dead. Police had been alerted about him in 2019 after he threatened to “kill everyone” in his home.
Duke University sociologist Jeffrey Swanson, an expert in red flag laws, said the Colorado Springs case could be another missed warning sign.
“This seems like a good idea, if the mother knew he had guns,” he said. “Had you taken firearms out of the situation, you could have had a different ending to the story.”
___
Condon reported from New York.
___
Contact AP’s global research team at [email protected].
