A gunman walked into a birthday party in Colorado Springs, Colorado just after midnight on Saturday and opened fire. He killed six people before taking his own life, according to police investigators.
The Denver Post reported that one of the guests, who attended the birthday party and left before the shooting, said that all the victims were members of the same extended family. The Post also reported that Freddy Marquez told reporters that his family had gathered to celebrate the birthdays of his wife and her brother.
While the shooter has not been identified publicly at the time of this writing, the police reported that he was the boyfriend of a woman who attended the birthday party celebration at Canterbury Mobile Home Park in Colorado Springs, a largely Latino residential community located about 70 miles south of Denver.
When the police arrived at the scene, they found six dead adults and a man with serious injuries who later died in the hospital. The police said that none of the children at the birthday party were harmed and they were in the custody of relatives.
By Monday morning, all of the victims of the mass shooting had been identified. A report in Colorado Springs’ the Gazette said, “The party celebrated the birthdays of Nubia Marquez, 28, and her brother, Melvin Perez, who would have turned 31 this week, as well as their mother, Joana Cruz, who would have turned 54 this week. ...”
The Gazette report went on, “Both Melvin Perez and Joana Cruz were killed. Also among the deceased were Nubia Marquez’s other brother, Jose Guttierez, 21; Melvin Perez’s wife, Mayra Perez, 32; and Mayra Perez’s sister Sandra Ibarra and brother Jose Ibarra.”
Coming in the early morning hours of Mother’s Day, the shooting is one of the deadliest mass killings in Colorado Springs’ history. In 2015, a gunman shot and killed three people at random before being killed himself in a shootout with police in Colorado Springs on Halloween. Less than a month later, a man killed three people, including a police officer, and injured nine others in a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in the city. The previous deadliest Colorado Springs gun mass killing appears to have occurred May 17, 1986, when five people were shot execution-style during two business robberies. The alleged shooter killed himself when confronted by law enforcement the next day. On September 20, 1911, six individuals were killed with axes in Colorado Springs and the murderer was never identified.
The deadliest shooting in the state of Colorado occurred in 1999 during the massacre at Columbine High School, when two armed students killed 12 of their classmates and one teacher, wounding more than twenty others during a shooting spree. The teenaged shooters—Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—committed suicide in the high school library.
This was followed in 2012 by the deadly shooting at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater in which James Holmes killed 12 people and injured 70 others during the screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises. After setting off tear gas canisters and firing multiple firearms into the theater audience, Holmes later surrendered to police.
The Mother’s Day Colorado Springs mass shooting follows by seven weeks the March 22 shooting at the south Boulder, Colorado King Soopers grocery store, in which 10 people were killed, including a police officer. The shooter—21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa—was apprehended and awaits trial.
According to a survey published by the Gun Violence Archive, there have been an average of 10 mass shootings every week in the US so far in 2021. This staggering number is based on a reported total of 194 instances of shootings where four or more people were killed.
Other mass shootings that took place on Mother’s Day occurred in Newark, New Jersey (four people shot on the street and in stable condition at the hospital), Phoenix, Arizona (one man killed and seven others injured at a hotel), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (two people dead and three injured in a neighborhood) and Citrus Heights, California (four injured in gunfire at a bar).
At a loss to explain the events in Colorado Springs and the ongoing wave of mass shootings across the US, Democratic Party Colorado Governor Jared Polis said it was “devastating, especially as many of us are spending the day celebrating the women in our lives who have made us the people we are today.”
With each episode of mass shootings in the US, the Democratic Party renews its paltry and narrow “gun control” agenda while seeking to block any public discussion of the brutal and violent character of capitalist society which gives rise to mass shootings, especially its deadly wars and repressive state apparatus.