Colorado has been the scene of several of the United States’ most notorious mass shootings, including those at Columbine High School in 1999 and a movie theater in Aurora in 2012.
Colorado Springs, in particular, has been forced to mourn several times before.
Last year, a gunman killed six people at a birthday party on Mother’s Day before taking his own life. The police said that “friends, family and children were gathered inside” a home at the Canterbury Mobile Home Park when the shooting occurred.
In 2015, a man with an assault-style rifle killed three people and wounded nine in a rampage at a Planned Parenthood office. Though he said he was motivated by opposition to abortion, he was found mentally unfit to stand trial and committed to a state-run psychiatric hospital.
Also in 2015, a man carrying a semiautomatic rifle fatally shot three people, apparently at random, on a residential street near downtown Colorado Springs. The gunman was fatally shot by police officers after he fired at them, the authorities said.