The Saturday shooting at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs occurred in a county where officers refused to exercise the full scope of the state’s red flag law, which allows law enforcement or family members to petition a judge to temporarily seize an individual’s firearms if they pose a significant risk.
A little more than a year before the attack, police responded to a call that the 22-year-old suspected shooter threatened his mother with a homemade bomb in June 2021, The Associated Press reported, prompting a response from a bomb squad and crisis negotiators.
The incident could have been grounds to trigger the state’s “red flag law” — or Extreme Risk Protection Orders — which went into effect in January 2020, eight years after the mass shooting inside a theater in Aurora, Colorado.
However, the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, which has jurisdiction in Colorado Springs, has previously refused to exercise the full extent of the gun restraining measure, and the county declared itself a “Second Amendment preservation county” in 2019, along with more than half of Colorado’s counties, according to a list compiled by KUSA, a Denver-based local news outlet.
https://www.insider.com/colorado-county-sheriffs-red-flag-laws-club-q-mass-shooting-2022-11
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