A shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, over the weekend left at least five people dead, 19 shot and 25 wounded.
According to CNN, it’s still too early to determine if the shooting at Club Q was a hate crime, but no matter what you call it, this is a tragedy. The victims’ deaths should be mourned, and acts of gun violence shouldn’t be forgotten.  
Colorado is, unfortunately, no stranger to mass shootings. There was the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999, which left 15 people dead. In July 2012, 12 people were killed and 70 were injured at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Six people were killed at a birthday party shooting in May 2021 in Colorado Springs.
The New York Times has released a list of U.S. mass shootings that have taken place so far in 2022. Nearly every month of the year has at least one mass shooting listed.
Just in the month of May, there were four shootings listed — 21 people killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; one person killed and four people critically wounded at a Presbyterian church in Laguna Woods, California; 10 people killed and three wounded in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York; and 16 people wounded in a shooting in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 
The Gun Violence Archive has a regular list of mass shootings in the U.S. The site defines mass shootings as a “minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident.”
These shootings are fueled by hatred and violence, and many of them target minority groups. 
One of the deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. was at a gay nightclub, Pulse Nightclub, in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016. The gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 more. 
There was a series of shootings in March 2021 at three massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgie. Eight people were killed, the majority of them of Asian descent, leading to the conclusion that the shooter had racial motives.
The United States Department of Justice has a list of examples of hate crimes. Each hate crime is organized into a category of either race, religion, sexual orientation, gender orientation or national origin. 
Whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, independent or something else; no matter where you’re from or what your identities are; and regardless of whether you own a gun — mass shootings are fueled by violence and hatred, and the innocent lives being stolen by senseless gun violence deserved to be mourned and deserved to be seen in the media. 
Kathryn Craddock is a 22-year-old mass communication senior from Patterson.