The establishment, which bears the name “Club Q”, thanked Sunday on Facebook “the heroic customers who subdued the shooter and put an end to this hateful attack”.
“At least two firearms were found at the scene. We are still working to identify the firearms and their owner, but I can confirm that the suspect used a rifle,” said the deputy chief of Colorado Springs City Police, Adrian Vasquez.
Authorities, at a press conference, did not immediately say whether Anderson Lee Aldrich, arrested and taken to hospital, acted alone.
Nor did they give any indication of the possible motive for the killing.
“At least two people in the box confronted him and fought with him. They managed to stop the suspect,” said Adrian Vasquez.
The US Federal Police (FBI) has also been asked to assist local police officers in the investigation.
The injured were transported to various hospitals in Colorado, a state in the center of the country.
The club also said it was “shattered by this senseless attack on our community” while Colorado Governor Jared Polis, the first openly gay governor elected in the United States, said on Saturday he was “horrified and devastated”.
The nightclub had announced an LGBT event on Saturday, a party “with all kinds of gender identities and numbers” on the occasion of Transgender Day of Remembrance, celebrated internationally on November 20.
This day of mobilization finds its origin in the assassination in 1998 in the United States of the transgender woman Rita Hester.
Orlando’s Tragic Precedent
This new drama is part of a context of resurgence of acts hostile to transgender people, according to statistics from associations and the FBI.
On June 12, 2016, an American of Afghan origin, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured around fifty others in a gay club in Orlando (Florida, Southeast), the Pulse.
The killing also illustrates the soaring mortality linked to firearms in a country where they circulate in very large numbers.
Since the beginning of the year, 601 mass shootings have been recorded in the United States, including the tragedy in Colorado Springs on Saturday, according to the organization Gun Violence Archive. A mass shooting that she said meant four or more people were shot or killed, not including the shooter.
The country has more individual weapons than inhabitants and has a death rate from firearms that is incomparable to that of other developed countries.
Around 49,000 people died from gunshot wounds in the United States in 2021, compared to 45,000 in 2020, which was already a record year. This represents more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.
Recent American history is indeed punctuated by killings, without any place of daily life seeming safe, from the company to the church, from the supermarket to the discotheque, from the public highway to public transport common.
Any attempt at truly binding legislation, however, comes up once morest the very powerful lobbying of the National Rifle Association, which has powerful parliamentary levers, as well as the fierce opposition of many conservative parliamentarians, supporters of a very broad interpretation of the constitutional right to hold gun.