The shooting at a King Soopers in Colorado Springs was troubling, to say the least. It was for me, especially because a friend of mine worked at a sister store in the area, only I didn’t know which store was hers. Luckily, she’s fine.
Regardless, any mass murder is a terrible thing, and so many of us who follow this sort of thing recognize certain patterns after a while.
First, there’s the immediate aftermath. At this point, anti-gunners can say anything they want, politicize the tragedy however they like, and the pro-gun side is supposed to sit there, shut up, and take our lumps.
Shockingly, this leads to more support for gun control, either locally or federally depending on the severity of the shooting.
Politicians begin their preening and introduce laws.
Here, though, things diverge. Sometimes those bills pass and other times they don’t.
In Colorado, following that particular shooting, some thing changed and others didn’t, but it seems that a lot of people forgot to learn the lessons of what actually transpired.
Earlier this month, Boulder marked three years since one of our community’s most devastating and unfathomable events: the King Soopers shooting.
On March 22, 2021, another troubled young man with another gun walked into a public space and started shooting. Like all mass shootings, the details are horrific, the violence incomprehensible — and all of it so utterly preventable. Yet here we are, three years later, and almost nothing has changed. For all intents and purposes, our community and our society remain just as vulnerable as ever.
That has to change.
…
We all know the nausea that comes with the news alert about another mass shooting. The sensation of having a bottomless pit in our stomachs. And we have likely all uttered the heartbroken phrase, “Not again.”
For most of us, the shock and horror and grief eventually fade. Even after our own community was stricken. Collectively, we were able to persevere. To stand back up and live our lives definitely in the face of this trauma. But it is this ability, this complacency, that, in a perverse, broken fashion, allows us to continue allowing these tragedies to occur. Because we can get up and go on and slowly forget that awful dread of possibility. Even when it strikes so close to home.
But we must remember that for some that relief never comes. That dread becomes crushing anguish. And for some, life does not go on. And we must remember that our society failed to protect them. Collectively, we must learn to persevere — to live joyously in the face of those who may wish us harm — while also harnessing our anger into political action. Because it doesn’t have to be this way. Because it isn’t this way in many other parts of the world.
Oh, yes, the whole “this is a uniquely American problem” line of crap that only exists when the supposedly more worldly betters completely ignore what an absolute hellhole much of the rest of the world actually is because of their gun control laws.
Let’s remember that we just saw a mass shooting–this one motivated my terrorism, but still a mass shooting–in the heavily gun-controlled and authoritarian Russia.
It was almost 12 years ago when I was personally touched by this horror. I’ve been there, learning that someone you care about was murdered by a maniac who just wanted to hurt and kill as many people as he could because his life was so pathetic.
I briefly wondered if I’d been wrong about guns until I realized that no, nothing changed. The gun wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t the tool but the tool using it.
The issue with this author here is that they got the wrong message, learned the wrong lessons, from the King Soopers tragedy.
The author notes that the young man was disturbed, but not that everyone knew that before the attack. He was known to have problems and yet, no one did anything about trying to address them. They never sought to have him adjudicated by the courts, which would have prohibited him from owning a firearm.
Funny how that doesn’t make the narrative.
After all, it sounds like he was dangerous enough to warrant it, yet no one sought to take that step. Because they didn’t, this author wants everyone’s gun rights to be impacted. They want to remove our ability to buy and sell firearms of certain types that make people like the author nervous. They want to make it easier to take your guns. They want to curtail your right to keep and bear arms.
Gun control failed in the King Soopers massacre. The answer isn’t more gun control. It never is, and that’s how we know people are getting the wrong lessons.
