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In 1993, a gunman killed four employees at a Chuck E. Cheese in Aurora, Colorado. Six years later, in 1999, two …
Subscriber Account active since In 1993, a gunman killed four employees at a Chuck E. Cheese in Aurora, Colorado. Six years later, in 1999, two teenagers at Columbine High School killed 12 students, a teacher, and injured 20 more people before killing themselves. In 2012, during a crowded screening of Batman in an Aurora movie theater, a man shot 12 people dead and wounded 58 others. Each of these shootings renewed debates about gun control, but anti-gun advocates generally failed to push through the tough laws they said were needed. On Monday afternoon, a man police have identified as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa,21, opened fire at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, killing 10 people. The shooting came less than a week after a different man killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women, at three Atlanta-area spas. Condemning the shootings, President Joe Biden on Tuesday urged Congress to pass legislation tightening gun control laws by expanding background checks for gun purchases and banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines that were similar to what was used in Boulder. It was a familiar refrain, as was the push-back from Republicans in Congress who said that limiting guns would infringe on people’s Second Amendment Rights and make everyone less safe. «In my judgment, we do not need more gun control,» Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, a Republican, said on Fox News. «We need more idiot control.» The calls were echoed in Colorado, which saw a 46 percent increase in gun sales last year as it conducted more than 500,000 background checks, most of which were approved. «With the sheer number of guns, our laws are relatively weak,» Eileen McCarran, president of Colorado Ceasefire Legislative Action, a gun violence prevention organization, told Insider. «But one of the things we would say is, think how much worse it would be if we hadn’t passed these.» According to a 2019 analysis by the Denver Post, Colorado had more mass shootings per capita than all except four states. Annette Moore, the co-founder of Blue Rising, a PAC focused on gun safety laws, told Insider that this is partly because promises made in the wake of mass shootings are rarely kept. «I feel like we do go through phases of, when a mass shooting happens, more attention is focused on gun safety, and there’s hope we can make big progress. And it somehow fades,» she said. «I hope this was the last straw and we can make more strides in Colorado.» Advocates say that some of the restrictions put in place over the last two decades might have limited the number of dead, but that putting an end to mass shootings in Colorado would require actions that guarantee guns do not end up in the wrong hands.
