A federal judge sentenced Club Q mass shooter Anderson Lee Aldrich to 190 years and 55 concurrent life sentences in prison yesterday after the 24-year-old pleaded guilty to 74 hate crime and gun charges. The shooter is currently serving a sentence of more than 2,000 years in Colorado for murder charges related to the attack at the LGBTQ+ nightclub.
The shooter, who is nonbinary, opened fire in November 2022 with an AR-15 style rifle and a handgun at Club Q in Colorado Springs, killing five people and wounding 19 others. The shooter was tackled and disarmed by clubgoers before being taken into custody. The massacre came over a year after the assailant was arrested for threatening to detonate a bomb and commit a mass shooting.
The Justice Department defines hate crimes as harmful, and often violent, acts against individuals on the basis of specified group characteristics like religious affiliation, sexuality, or race. Nearly 14,000 hate crimes are reported in the US annually. See statistics here.
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