The murderer who killed five people at the Club Q bar in Colorado Spring had been arrested in the summer of 2021 for two counts of felony menacing and three counts of first-degree kidnapping, but they was never entered into the state’s “red flag” system to keep guns away from dangerous individuals because the county where they allegedly committed the crimes likely because the county is a “Second Amendment sanctuary” jurisdiction declared by county commissioners, CNN reports.
Colorado’s red flag law, signed by Democratic Governor Jared Polis in 2019, requires a complainant to initiate action to take away weapons from dangerous individuals, with many times the action being taken by law enforcement officers who act on behalf of a victim who is too scared or intimidated to file a complaint. However, the El Paso County (Colorado) sheriff’s office has never initiated a red flag hearing although they have arrested scores of people on abuse, assault or other charges since the law went into effect.
“We’re going to be taking personal property away from people without having due process,” El Paso County Sheriff Bill Elder told a local television station. “We’re not going to pursue these on our own, meaning the sheriff’s office isn’t going to run over and try to get a court order.” Elder also insinuated that the Sheriff’s Office would not execute a judge’s order to seize an individual’s guns, saying after a judge issues such an order, “it is up to law enforcement to execute that order.”
Anderson Lee Aldrich, who reportedly uses they/them pronouns, was charged in 2021 for a number of crimes, including the menacing and kidnapping charges. They was questioned by law enforcement officials in the Summer of 2021 after their mother issued a complaint that her child had threatened to blow up her home with a bomb. They was not charged in that incident. In Summer 2021 they had also told their family that they intended to commit a mass shooting; that information was reportedly relayed to law enforcement at the time of the bomb threat, but prosecutors and law enforcement chose not to pursue them.
The Colorado red flag law ends an imposed ban after one year, which means the 2019 charges likely wouldn’t have barred Aldrich from getting guns. Instead, they bought the assault rifle used in the Club Q massacre earlier in the day of the shooting.
Second Amendment Sanctuary jurisdictions have declared that they will not enforce gun restriction laws that individual politicians and officeholders disagree with because they believe such laws don’t save lives and are a tyrannical overreach of federal lawmakers. Many county sheriffs, traditionally a conservative lot, have banned together–given the uneducated and Constitutional-dubious opinion that sheriffs are the highest level of law enforcement in the nation because they are the highest elected official specifically designed to enforce laws.
As a group, these sheriffs have claimed they do not have to enforce federal gun laws because they claim, without legal justification, that the federal government cannot legislate gun laws. They also feel that any law limiting ownership f guns is illegal despite Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who is still dead, writing in the Heller opinion that gun restrictions are perfectly legal. They also feel that state laws limiting gun ownership are illegal, unilaterally deciding to not enforce state laws even though they are law enforcement officers sworn to uphold their state constitutions and laws and the US Constitution.
Conservative attempt to draw a parallel between the refusal to enforce of federal gun laws with local and state governments’ decision to bypass federal immigration law to round up undocumented immigrants, but the parallel is faulty at its premise: according to the Constitution, the federal government is explicitly responsible for border security and enforcing immigration law, not the states.