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We build stories out of the messy, contradictory realities of our lives. Rich Fierro is the hero of the mass shooting at the Club Q, the gay club in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We need more heroes and fewer events that create them. Fierro is a retired Army major who appears to have had something approaching a flashback, a reflex response from the brutalizing violence he experienced in Iraq when Anderson Lee Aldrich opened fire in the night club.
These are the indelible memories, psychic damage that haunt so many veterans. In interviews, Fierro has said they haunt him too and were one of the reasons he left the military. In this moment, though, they were lifesaving. Fierro rushed, tackled, disarmed and violently beat Aldrich, alongside another patron and a trans dancer in the club who helped subdue him. Numerous accounts include the evocative detail that the dancer helped subdue Aldrich by stomping him with her high heel.
In Fierro’s accounts you hear those telltale patterns like a switch going off, actions triggered beneath the level of conscious thought. “I was in mode,” Fierro tells CNN in one interview. “I was doing what I did, what I do downrange. I trained for this. I don’t want to ever do this. I didn’t even … [I] retired because I was just … I was done doing this stuff. It was too much.”
The attack is a product of what is sometimes called “stochastic terrorism.” Mass incitement causes individuals to act out with violence. It is cause and effect. But precisely who will act out in this way, when and where, is impossible to know. In one definition, stochastic terrorism is “to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”
The attack comes amidst a broadening moral panic on the right about transgender people which has triggered an intensification of demonization and incitement against LGBT people generally. Over the course of the pandemic years, advocacy for the rights and acceptance of transgender people and non-normative gender expressions generally has been repackaged on the right as a form of pedophilia or sexual exploitation. When you hear the word “grooming” on the right today, that is what they are talking about. It has blended into the earlier “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories about Democrats running hidden pedophilia rings with sinister globalist powers.
Other elements of the tragedy contain competing visions of 21st century America. Against the backdrop of paranoia and fear about drag shows as luring grounds for exploitation, here you have Rich Fierro, a straight veteran at the club with his wife and kids to take in a drag show. Indeed, poke into Fierro’s story and you have a representative of the other America almost too on point and novelistic to be believed. Fierro and wife Jess are the co-owners of the Atrevida brewery, where Jess Fierro is master brewer. The brewery’s motto is “Diversity, It’s on tap.” One of the brews on sale is “Dolores Huerta Mexican Lager.” You get the idea. If you commissioned a screenwriter to draw up a character to represent the diverse, tolerant, complicated America Blue State America wants itself to be you’d probably need to create a character something like Rich Fierro.
On the issue of drag shows and transgender people that character might have said something like, “These kids want to live that way, want to have a good time, have at it. I’m happy about it because that is what I fought for, so they can do whatever the hell they want.”
Which is what the actual Rich Fierro said after the incident.
Eighteen months ago the alleged shooter, Aldrich, holed up in his mother’s home threatening her life with a homemade bomb and various firearms. A SWAT team eventually coaxed him out of the house with no injuries. An entire neighborhood had to be evacuated as a result of the incident.
For as yet unexplained reasons prosecutors let felony kidnapping and menacing charges drop. The incident failed to trigger Colorado’s “red flag” law which would have allowed authorities to confiscate Aldrich’s weapons and prevent him from purchasing more. Unsurprisingly, acquaintances said Aldrich frequently used the gay slur “fa**ot” in anger. Aldrich’s grandfather, his mother’s father, is a far-right elected official in California who lauded the Jan 6th insurrectionists. Outgoing state assemblyman Randy Voepel (R-Santee) lost his seat on November 8th after redistricting forced him into a race with another Republican, Marie Waldron of Escondido.
