The children who were in the home at the time were not injured and are staying with relatives, the police said.
“Words fall short to describe the tragedy that took place this morning,” Vince Niski, chief of the Colorado Springs Police Department, said in a statement. “As the chief of police, as a husband, as a father, as a grandfather, as a member of this community, my heart breaks for the families who have lost someone they love and for the children who have lost their parents.”
The police on Sunday were trying to determine a motive for the shooting. The names of the victims and the gunman will be released by the El Paso County coroner, the authorities said.
Chief Niski said that officers and investigators were “left incredibly shaken.”
In March, 10 people were killed in a shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colo.
Three people were killed in a shooting at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado Springs in 2015, nearly a month after three people were killed by a man carrying a semiautomatic rifle on a residential street near the city’s downtown.