Clip: Did anti-LGBTQ rhetoric motivate Colorado Springs shooter?

Yamiche Alcindor: Tonight, we begin with the heartbreaking series of mass shooting this Thanksgiving week. Last weekend in Colorado Springs, a gunman opened fire inside of a nightclub long considered to be a safe space for the LGBTQ community within a historically conservative city. At least five people were killed there and more than a dozen others injured.

And then on Tuesday night in Chesapeake, Virginia, another gunman killed at least six people and injured others at a Walmart. According to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit that tracks mass shootings, in the U.S. just this year, there have been more than 600 mass shootings. It's just incredible to think about.

Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Toluse Olorunnipa, the White House bureau chief for The Washington Post, Dave Philipps, National Correspondent for The New York Times, he is in Colorado Springs, and here at the table, Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief at USA Today, and Heidi Przybyla, a national investigative correspondent for Politico. So, thank you all for being here.

Dave, I want to start with you. You're there. You have been on the ground covering that mass shooting that happened in your hometown, Colorado Springs. Tell us what happened with this shooting and how patrons at that night club fought back.

Dave Philipps, National Correspondent, The New York Times: It is really a sad but incredible story. It was midnight on Saturday night and the gunman came in and just immediately started shooting very rapidly with a high-powered assault rifle. He killed five and injured about 18 others.

But what is remarkable about this is within a minute of when he started shooting, a 45-year-old combat veteran who was there with his wife and grown his daughter watching a drag performance, he tackled the shooter. And with the help of other patrons, they essentially beat with his own gun and held him down until the police arrived something like three minutes later. So, it was one of the rare instances where a shooting like this happens that could have been so much worse if people hadn't immediately responded and taken a lot of risk.

Yamiche Alcindor: I mean, they took so many risks. They are heroes, when I was just reading about your stories and so many of the other interviews that these patrons have been giving.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the significance of this happening in Colorado Springs given the history of that city as being anti-LGBTQ at times, conservative space, historically.

Dave Philipps: Well, that's right. Colorado Springs, especially during the 1990s, was really a center of not just conservative Christianity, but really an organized conservative Christian political movement that sought to limit the rights of gays and lesbians and do other things to try and remake the world according to the values they wanted to see.

Now, that was a long time ago and they have waned in influence as the city has grown. But this is still a very, very conservative community. Republicans outnumber registered Democrats 2-1. And so the club where the shooting happened, Club Q, it really become more than just a bar or a dance club, it was a community center in a lot of ways for this town of 500,000, a place where people could come together and have that community that they can really see reflected in the larger culture and have a safe space.

Yamiche Alcindor: And talking about safe spaces, I mean, the other thing, Susan, is, of course, there is a shooting in Virginia at Walmart. Anyone who shopped anywhere sort of gave me chills just thinking about you're going about your day and then there is a terrible shooting.

I want to point to the statistic that stopped me on my tracks when I was preparing for this show. Not a single week in 2022 has passed without at least more four mass shootings. That's according to The Washington Post. What are you hearing from your sources, the White House, Capitol Hill, about how to prevent this from continuing to happen like this?

Susan Page, Washington Bureau Chief, USA Today: And, of course, most of those cases, we never hear about. We never read about them. They have become something that's of interest to an individual community where it happens, and yet there is clearly no safe space for Americans to go to. You can't -- to go to elementary schools, you go to shops, you go churches, you go to grocery stores, these have all been the sites of horrific mass shootings.

And yet the debate over gun control, how many times have we said that that's stalemated? There was a legislation passed and signed by President Biden in June that did something to provide incentives for states to have red flag laws, for instance, increased background checks for young people. But the idea of more serious gun measures that would, say, get assault weapons out of the hands of shooters is just something we don't seem to have the political will to do.

Yamiche Alcindor: And, Toluse, you are at the White House, of course. What are you hearing from White House officials that are sitting down with their families on Thanksgiving, but also thinking about all of the other families now that are sitting down at a Thanksgiving table without their loved ones?

Toluse Olorunnipa, White House Bureau Chief, The Washington Post: Well, President Biden was elected in part because he was someone who knows how to empathize with the American people in 2020. There are a lot of people who had empty seats at their Thanksgiving table because of the pandemic and because of a number of different things. And now he is having to deal with the fact that there are a number of people who have empty seats at the Thanksgiving table because of gun violence.

And he has touted the law that Susan mentioned that was passed earlier this year, a bipartisan gun law that -- the first time that happened in more than 30 years, but it was a limited law that will not prevent a lot of these mass shootings because there are a number of things that the president and Democrats want to do, including an assault weapons ban that Republicans were not going to go along with.

And so the White House has said that President Biden continue to be optimistic about the idea of an assault weapons ban. It is hard to square that with the political reality of the fact that the White House is not going to be able to pass much legislation in the next two years because Republicans are going to be in charge of the house and they have said that they do not want to pass additional laws, especially on gun rights.

And so it's hard to see where that optimism is coming from and it's hard to see exactly what powers the president might have to be able to restrict access to guns by people who would want to do harm people on a mass scale because it is hard to do any of that through executive authority. You have to pass laws, and it's very difficult to pass gun laws in this country, especially in a divided government, which we're about to go into.

Yamiche Alcindor: Certainly. And, Heidi, you have been covering two beats there, I think, are so central to what we are talking about. You've been covering education but also really the conspiracy theory beat, if that's a beat we can even call it that. Because -- and I bring that up because with the Colorado Springs shooting, there are a lot of people in the LGBTQ community who are saying, part of why they're feeling targeted and their lives are more in danger is because of the rhetoric, frankly, coming from the right with conspiracy theories saying that some LGBTQ people want to brainwash children. What are you hearing?

Heidi Przybyla, National Investigative Correspondent, Politico: There has been a huge investment just over the past couple of years of shifting the culture wars to this issue of LGBTQ and the community. You look at just the number of bills that have been introduced in state legislatures, the most ever. You look at the rhetoric that's coming from some of the right-wing outlets. And, of course, this community feels threatened.

And then you see something like this, at the same time, those same communities and individuals who are making these statements aren't -- there is no mea culpa here. Listen to what Herschel Walker said. He doubled down. He said people who can't tell the difference between a man and woman are the enemy. He said this after the shooting.

And so this is a huge concern because not only do we have a gun problem in this country, that's been longstanding, we have increasingly what many are calling a domestic terrorism problem that is really being cultivated and radicalized on the far-right by individuals who believe that story time for children ages three to eight, where they are singing, if you are happy and you know it, clap your hands, that that is sexualizing children.

But there's a through line here too, Yamiche, and that is if you remember, even going back to the campaign, it's almost as if many on the right are trying to make anyone who is their opponent or anyone who is their opponent politically or in the culture wars into a pedophile. They were suggesting Joe Biden was a pedophile, they called Mallory McMorrow, who is in the Michigan legislature a groomer. And so there's this almost a dystopian, Russian-style attempt to smear people as pedophiles because it's the one thing that is universally abhorrent important is pedophilia, right?

Yamiche Alcindor: And there is also the 2024 politics, something Secretary Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said that the most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. Of course, she's the head of the Federation of Teachers. She's a teachers union. Talk about how 2024 politics are playing in here if you talk about fringe right but also some mainstream Republicans are talking about this too.

Heidi Przybyla: Well, this is also cutting into the suburban vote as well. If you look at what happened in Virginia with Glenn Youngkin, that battle was really fought on school boards and on the notion that, for instance, critical race theory is being taught in schools. I did a lot of reporting on that. I did not find any evidence of what critical race theory is other than teaching accurate history about segregation, Jim Crow, slavery. Some people feel that that is making white kids feel guilty or bad and that that is their critical race theory.

But this is touching a nerve. Again, folks stoking the cultural war, shifting the front, the battleground now to schools, whether it is LGBTQ and accusing people of grooming children or these debates over critical race theory. This is where they're trying to have the battlefront.

Yamiche Alcindor: And, Dave, you are there in Colorado. It's seen some of the country's worst mass shootings. I wonder what you're hearing on the ground from people about what can prevent this but also what we have all been talking about, which is that Washington, does it really have possibly an answer for these communities?

Dave Philipps: What we heard again and again is frustration that this is not a unique problem or a new problem, but one that everyone is so used to it, that when someone came in and started shooting with a military-style weapon in this bar, the patrons immediately knew that they had to attack him. They had seen it play out before.

And what are they saying? What I heard over and over again when I tried to report on is this a hate crime, is this a question of targeting the LGBTQ community, a lot of people in that community said to me, like, hey, look, this is more than anything a gun violence problem. We are never going to be able to make everybody love us, but at least we could try and make things a little safer so that dozens of people are not shot.

Yamiche Alcindor: Dave, thank you so much for sharing your reporting on the ground there. It's so important to have you. I appreciate you making your Washington Week debut.