Opinion: Only Gun Control Will Help My Hometown Heal
Members of the Boulder community gathered outside the grocery store where ten people lost their lives to to gun violence (Photo courtesy of Carter Hanson ’23)
By Carter Hanson, Opinions Editor, and Emily Dalgleish
On Monday, I faced an all-too-familiar American experience: agonizing over the safety of friends, family, and loved ones after a mass shooting. The shooting in Boulder was at the grocery store where my family shops, which is two minutes from my high school, and that I have been to hundreds of times. I got the news that my family was safe and at home. Ten families this week and eight families last week did not hear that message from their loved ones, and instead experienced the appalling tragedy of losing them to gun violence.
We cannot keep going through this.
Just over three years ago, 2,000 students at my high school walked out after Parkland to protest for gun safety legislation, myself among them. We stood in silence for seventeen minutes to remember and mourn for the seventeen Parkland students who had lost their lives to gun violence. Nothing could bring back those students and lull the pain inflicted on their family, friends, and community, but we—who stood in a field in Boulder and remembered—thought we were building a movement.
It is in this same Boulder neighborhood, almost within sight of my high school, where 10 people were killed in a mass shooting on Monday. After Parkland, after Las Vegas, after Sandy Hook I knew it could happen anywhere—and I knew that Colorado is no stranger to mass shootings. That being said, I still truly believed that Boulder—my beautiful, hippy-dippy, wacky, innocent Boulder—was immune. Things like that just didn’t happen in Boulder.
But when I saw a picture of King Soopers employees fleeing the scene, when I recognized one of them from high school choir, when I noticed they were running past a coffee shop I had frequented, the true weight of reality finally sunk in and I realized that it really can happen anywhere.
So now Boulder is famous and is on its way to becoming yet another synonym for public mass murder, our most American of problems. I am heartbroken, of course, but more than that, I am furious. This should have never happened. We should not fear getting murdered by weapons of war while buying groceries.
(Photo courtesy of Carter Hanson ’23)
The great tragedy of the shooting in Boulder is that it was predictable: mass shootings are ubiquitous in the United States like no other developed nation. Today is the one-week anniversary of the shooting in Atlanta, which claimed the lives of eight Americans. It’s been a year-and-a-half since the El Paso shooting. Three years since the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. Three years since Parkland, four since Las Vegas, five since Orlando, six since San Bernadino, nine since Newtown and Aurora. And on and on and on.
Despite the regularity of mass shootings, nothing changes. When I stood on that field with my high school classmates in 2018, I believed that gun policy would improve and that common sense would prevail. And though some progress was made, nothing at the federal level improved, and one of my classmates, Denny Stong, lost his life on Monday while working at the King Soopers.
And why is it so difficult to pass substantive common-sense gun control that has bi-partisan support in the general public? Because in America, political power rests on culture wars, and guns have been deified by the Republican Party. After Parkland, in 2018, the City of Boulder enacted an assault weapons ban in the hopes of preventing mass shootings like the one at King Soopers on Monday. In a twist of equal parts tragic, ironic, and dramatic, Boulder’s assault weapons ban was overturned just 10 days before Monday’s shooting by a district court judge in a suit brought against the city by the NRA.
Though I feel like I have been shouting this after every mass shooting in my lifetime, the political imperative remains: the time to act is now. To accusations of politicization, I respond that I, as a member of the Boulder community, have not just a right, but a responsibility to politicize. It could have been my friends, or my parents, or me; if the solution is political, so be it.
The presidency, Congress, Colorado governorship, and state legislature are now all Democratically controlled. It should not take two mass shootings in a week and single-party control to pass common-sense gun legislation, but we must act on this opportunity to put a stop to these senseless shootings.
This month, two relatively minor bills that would extend background checks passed the House and are headed to the Senate. Because these bills are limited in extent, passing them through the Senate would open the window of opportunity to more substantive measures. But to really have an impact on gun violence, Congress must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, like the City of Boulder had in effect until only ten days before the King Soopers mass shooting.
Much of this can—and should—start at the state-level. In recent years, Colorado has passed gun control through the state legislature, such as the implementation of wider background checks after the 2012 Aurora theater shooting and the passage of a red flag law in 2019. That being said, as long as assault weapons can be purchased in one state and taken illegally to another state, assault weapons bans will have limited effectiveness. The solution is simple — ban assault weapons at the federal level.
Substantive federal-level gun control must also be paired with reforms targeting the roots of gun violence. That means expanding the availability of mental health resources. It means tackling white supremacy and domestic terrorism. It means strengthening and extending the social safety net, as poverty is one of the primary catalysts of violent crime.
I know how resilient our Boulder community is, but we cannot do this alone. I have been advocating for gun safety reform for years, but this week has devastated me. I have found it difficult to motivate and organize political action despite my awareness for how desperately we need it. I understand how easy it is to feel numb after watching too many mass shootings, but while our community is grieving, we need support from the rest of our country in the form of political action.
Do not wait until you see your own grocery store on national news. Do not wait until the name of your town is shorthand for mass murder. Do not wait until you have to call your friends and family asking if they are safe. The moment for action should have been before any of these tragedies occurred. That moment has passed, and we cannot recover the dead. Those losses must now drive our fight to make sure this never happens again.
March 24, 2021
Well written. Your words are true and should lie heavily upon our shoulders. As it is your generation that has been steeped in this reality,Your generation has been left to clean up our mess.What we know is there is nothing more sacred than the right to own any type of gun and posses as much ammunition as one desires. This is America today, what is our tomorrow? I am sorry for my generation and will continue to vote for a paradigm shift. Someone else’s freedoms are not worth the hundreds of lives we have sacrificed to the gun lobby.