WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Survivors of mass shootings targeting U.S. LGBT nightclubs detailed the violence they endured and criticized inflammatory political rhetoric in a congressional hearing on Wednesday.
“We’re being slaughtered and dehumanized across this country, in communities you took oaths to guard,” said Matthew Haynes, owner of the Club Q nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where five people were killed and 22 wounded in a mass shooting last month.
“LGBTQ issues usually are not political issues,” Haynes added. “They usually are not lifestyles. They usually are not beliefs or selections. They’re basic human rights.”
The hearing by the U.S. House Oversight Committee was to explore anti-LGBT violence.
Michael Anderson told lawmakers he was bartending at Club Q, when the gunman entered the nightclub and started shooting.
“I saw my friend lying on the ground, bleeding out, knowing there was little to no probability of surviving that bullet wound,” Anderson said.
Experts on LGBT issues told the panel that the attack at Club Q and other acts of violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans lately have been fueled by state laws that they said further marginalized the community.
They cited a 2016 bill in North Carolina that required transgender individuals to make use of restrooms, changing rooms and showers that corresponded to the sex on their birth certificates and laws passed in Florida last yr nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill which barred classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for a lot of young students.
President Joe Biden signed a modest gun-safety bill into law in June within the wake of mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, Recent York, but anti-gun violence activists have called for more to be done.
There have been 628 mass shootings across america to date this yr, in line with the Gun Violence Archive. LGBT persons are nearly 4 times as likely than non-LGBT people to be the victims of violent crime, in line with the Williams Institute on the UCLA School of Law.
“We just need to live. Is that a lot to ask?” Brandon Wolf, an activist and survivor of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting through which 49 people were killed and 69 wounded, told the hearing.
(Reporting by Makini Brice in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Matthew Lewis)
Copyright 2022 Thomson Reuters.