A Saturday night massacre at a bar in Colorado Springs left five dead and at least 25 wounded, but it would’ve been immeasurably more bloody had it not been for a retired U.S. Army officer and the “toxic” masculinity that drove him to action.

Rich Fierro, who served three tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, rushed and tackled the 22-year-old assailant who opened fire inside a gay nightclub called Club Q, telling reporters that he tried to use the attacker’s own pistol to “finish him.”

“It’s the reflex,” said Fierro to the assembled media outside his home on Monday. “Go! Go to the fire. Stop the action. Stop the activity. Don’t let no one get hurt. I tried to bring everybody back.” As Fox News reports:

Fierro could smell the cordite from the ammunition, saw the flashes and dove, pushing one of his friends down before falling backwards.

Looking up from the floor, Fierro saw the shooter’s body armor and the crowd that had fled to the club’s patio. Moving toward the attacker, Fierro grasped the body armor, yanked the shooter down while yelling at another patron, James, to move the rifle out of reach.

As the shooter was pinned under a barrage of punches from Fierro and kicks to the head from James, he tried to reach for his pistol. Fierro grabbed it and used it as a bludgeon.

Fierro’s wife, Jess, said on the Facebook page of their family business, a local brewery, that her husband had bruised his right side and injured his hands, knees, and ankle. “He was covered in blood,” she wrote.

The disturbed assailant was already known to local law enforcement for an incident in June 2021. At the time, he was arrested for a bomb threat that led to a standoff with law enforcement at his mother’s home. In addition, the killer “identifies” as non-binary and uses “they/them” pronouns according to his lawyers. Beyond the Left’s boilerplate anti-2A rhetoric, there are and should be reasonable grounds for removing firearms. Here, it appears, was one such case.

None of this, however, stopped the shameless opportunists on the Left from immediately blaming Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans. “After Trump elevated anti-immigrant & anti-Latino rhetoric,” tweeted Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “we had the deadliest anti-Latino shooting in modern history. After anti-Asian hate w/COVID, Atlanta. Tree of life. Emanuel AME. Buffalo. And now after an anti-LGBT+ campaign, Colorado Springs. Connect the dots, @GOP.”

We have no idea what drove the assailant to commit mayhem and murder — nor does a narcissistic leftist congresswoman from Queens — but we suspect it had a lot more to do with emotional imbalance and individual brokenness than it did Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. Unless there’s a growing community of nonbinary they/them ultra-MAGA types we’re not aware of.

Fierro had been at the club with his daughter Kassy, her boyfriend, and several others to see a drag show and celebrate a birthday. His daughter’s boyfriend, Raymond Green Vance, was among those fatally shot.

Somehow, we suspect he wasn’t thinking Damn those Republican lawmakers! when he sprang into action, but many of those there that night were spared because he did. “Honestly, I don’t care about myself in that moment,” he said. “I cared about everybody that was around me and I cared especially about my family.”

“As soon as I got done with that guy and the cop came in, I went across the room and started first aid with my friend who was shot in the chest and the legs in the arms.”

As Task and Purpose reports: “Fierro entered the Army as a field artillery officer in 1999, deploying to Iraq from November 2003 to February 2004, January 2006 to December 2006, September 2008 to August 2009, and then to Afghanistan from April 2011 to April 2012 before leaving the service as a major in 2013. During that time he received numerous awards, including the Combat Action Badge and two Bronze Stars, according to his service record.”

The father and husband said he relied on his combat training to respond to the situation. “I don’t know exactly what I did, I just went into combat mode,” Fierro said. “I just know I have to kill this guy before he kills us.”

“I told him while I was hitting him, I said, ‘I’m going to f***ing kill you, man, because you tried to kill my friends.’ My family was in there. My little girl was in there,” he said.

Fierro isn’t the first man to act courageously and aggressively to save the lives of others. In fact, he’s emblematic of traditional manhood and masculinity and military training. And for that, the surviving patrons of Club Q — and their friends and families — can be thankful.