November 25, 2022 - 10:39am

Earlier this week, 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich entered an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Dressed in tactical gear and wielding an assault-style rifle — legally purchased despite a 2021 arrest for an alleged bomb threat that was never adjudicated — Aldrich murdered five people and wounded 17 others before being violently subdued by nightclub patrons. When Aldrich appeared in court on Wednesday, the face of the shooter, whose attorneys said uses they/them pronouns, was described as “bruised” and “swollen,” his jaw and mouth so damaged that he was “uttering slurred responses” to questions from the judge. 

As the details of the shooting have emerged, the outline of yet another uniquely American — and all-too-common — tragedy emerged. Aldrich, obese and unprepossessing, was on the receiving end of bullying not just from his various classmates but also his father, Aaron “The Frijolero” Brink. Brink, an ex-con turned mixed martial artist had fought and lost to the likes of MMA world champions such as Andrei Arlovski and Alistair Overeem while simultaneously maintaining an adult film career as “Dick Delaware” (star of films like Cum Drippers 4 and Spider-Man XXX: A Porn Parody). 

In a recent homophobic diatribe, Brink — whose crippling methamphetamine addiction has landed him on episodes of the cable shows Intervention and Divorce Court — told a reporter who asked him about the shooting that he was relieved to learn Aldrich wasn’t gay, though he did offer condolences to the victims in a part of the story that hasn’t circulated as widely. Aldrich’s mother, Laura Voepel, an inveterate criminal and drug addict with whom he cohabitated, was the daughter of Republican California Assemblyman Randy Voepel, a politician whom one colleague described as “anti-gay, racist, and very pro-gun.”

Predictably, Aldrich’s actions have sparked outrage from the Left, with many pointing to the shooter’s family influences as well as his internet activity — he maintained a YouTube channel, “TheAzzbackward,” on which he had uploaded a single 45-second animated video, “Asian Homosexual Gets Molested” — as ostensible evidence of Right-wing radicalisation. Aldrich was certainly unwell, much like Paul Pelosi’s assailant, but as in that case, the derangement is much more generalised and political language merely a rhetorical library that can be raided to justify any number of insane notions. 

Aldrich’s 2021 bomb threat, which was not subsequently prosecuted, was made against his mother Laura, and a doorbell recording from that event captures Aldrich saying, “This is where I stand…today I die…they don’t give a fuck about me anymore, clearly.” Aldrich, by that standard, is almost a textbook “blackpilled” youth who is drowning at the noxious bottom of the American cultural barrel, a “NEET” — “not in education, employment, or training” — for whom life holds no meaning and death would perhaps be a release. 

Some trigger or another drew Aldrich to that club, certainly, but his tortuous path to that horrific event is a multi-causal study in societal breakdown and despair. The Right, to its discredit, has produced some bizarre responses as well, like Newsmax contributor Jenna Ellis using her platform to explain that, since “there is no evidence” the shooting victims were Christians, “they are now reaping the consequences of eternal damnation.”

Other responses will be equally predictable, and likely just as hopeless. President Joe Biden again called for tighter restrictions on gun purchases and firearm availability, but this doesn’t reach the larger problem that one estimate puts the number of firearms in the U.S. at 400 million – 1.2 guns for every person living in the country. This estimate, which is probably low due to the illicit trade in these arms, is far beyond the number that could be captured by government buy-back programmes, as was the case in Australia.

In 2022, there have so far been 662 mass shootings leading to 671 deaths and 2,616 injuries — many of which, truth be told, are in large metropolitan areas and tied to gang violence. Thus far, only the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas (22) and Buffalo, New York (10) have reached double-digit fatalities, but there is still a month left in the year. 

The traditional remedy for gun violence in the U.S. has been neither mental health — attending to, say, the sort of lives that lead to “deaths of despair” — or gun confiscation, but rather increasingly draconian criminal punishments that have resulted in a swelling prison population. The likeliest antidote in a society as dispersed and distrusting as this one is likely to be more politicians winning elections with “tough on crime” policies and more lower-class violent offenders locked up — a treatment of the symptoms unlikely to please either Left or Right. There is no magic bullet to fix this multi-faceted crisis, but what is obvious is that the U.S.’s approach is failing miserably.


Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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