A gunman is suspected of opening fire Saturday night at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs in the United States, killing at least five people and injuring 18 others, police said.
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“There was a shooting at a local club tonight. We have eighteen people injured and five killed,” said police spokeswoman Pamela Castro, warning that this toll was likely to change.
The injured were transported to various hospitals in Colorado, a state in the center of the country.
Police officers responding to a call around 11:57 p.m. local time (6:57 a.m. Sunday) reporting a shooting in progress at this local club, called Club Q, “located an individual inside who we believe to be the suspect “, she continued. This man, presumed author of the shots and injured, was arrested and hospitalized.
The US Federal Police (FBI) has also been asked to assist local police officers in the investigation.
Emergency medical personnel consisting of dozens of firefighters and 11 ambulances were deployed to the scene of the shooting, according to Colorado Springs Fire Department spokesman Mike Smaldino.
Club Q thanked “the heroic customers who subdued the shooter and put an end to this heinous attack” for their quick response, according to a Facebook post on Sunday. The club say they are “shattered by this senseless attack on our community”.
The nightclub had announced an LGBTQ 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 has been organized since 1998, after the assassination of transgender woman Rita Hester became a symbol of the oppression suffered by the transgender community. The date of November 20 is an invitation to remember the victims of transphobia.
Colorado Springs police said they are planning a press conference early Sunday morning on the shooting. 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.
US President Joe Biden marked the fifth anniversary of the Orlando massacre last year by announcing that the club would become a national memorial.
The United States pays a very heavy price for the spread of firearms in its territory and the ease with which Americans have access to them.
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: one in three adults owns at least one weapon and nearly one in two adults lives in a home where there is a weapon.
The consequence of this proliferation is the very high rate of firearm deaths in the United States, unmatched by that of other developed countries.
Around 49,000 people died from gunshot wounds 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.
However, it is the shootings with many victims that mark the spirits the most.
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.
One of these massacres, committed in a high school in Florida on February 14, 2018 in Parkland, triggered a vast national movement, spearheaded by young people, to demand stricter supervision of individual weapons in the United States.
But, despite the mobilization of more than a million demonstrators, the United States Congress did not pass ambitious legislation, many elected officials being under the influence of the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), the first American arms lobby.
In fact, in a country where the possibility of owning a firearm is considered by millions of Americans as a fundamental constitutional right, the only recent legislative advances remain marginal, such as the generalization of criminal and psychiatric background checks above all weapon purchase.