The man who gunned down 10 in a Boulder bloodbath had purchased his weapon, an AR-15 type assault weapon, only six days prior.
Only 10 days prior to that, the city of Boulder lost a lawsuit banning the purchase of assault weapons.
Boulder voters passed the ordinance in 2018 with the goal of limiting the purchase of rapid-fire weapons capable of firing multiple rounds of ammunition.
The conclusion?
Guns are too easy to buy. And it pains us to think Boulder’s law might have kept someone from selling the young man the weapon he used to randomly spray bullets that killed innocent victims.
Gun rights activists almost immediately filed suit against the Boulder ordinance, arguing their civic right to bear arms had been violated. On March 12, a district judge said the city could not restrict guns that are otherwise legal under federal and state laws.
Which begs the question as to why the United States allows private citizens the right to purchase military-grade weaponry that can cause such terrible harm.
In the last 20-plus years, Colorado has witnessed six mass shootings, including the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, 15 killed, 24 injured; the Aurora movie theater in 2012, 12 dead, 58 injured; and now the King Soopers grocery store, 10 dead.
IT DIDN’T used to be this way.
In 1994, the U.S. Congress banned the sale of assault weapons. After the ban was allowed to expire in 2004, the death toll from mass shootings went from 4.8 per year to 23.8 per year, according to a 2019 report by New York University’s School of Medicine. The study concluded that mass shooting deaths were 70% less likely during the ban.
Not only did shootings increase, but so did the sale of weapons, specifically the AR-15, a lightweight version of the military’s M-16. In the eight years after the ban was lifted, sales for semi-automatic rifles more than tripled, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
WHEN HE was a U.S. Senator, 1973-2009, President Joe Biden voted for the ban of assault weapons.
As vice president for Barack Obama, Biden was charged to come up with gun safety measures in the wake of the assault on Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. There, 26 were killed, including 20 first- and second-graders.
That most recent effort, and those since, have failed, despite the overwhelming desire of the greater public for tighter gun laws.
THE HOUSE recently passed two measures addressing gun violence. One is to approve the expansion of background checks and the other to give federal law enforcement more time to vet gun buyers.
