It would have been naive for Aurora, and the rest of the world, to think that within a few years of the horror of the Aurora theater shooting, such atrocities would dwindle and finally stop.
After all, the July 20, 2012 Aurora theater shooting came more than 13 years after the Columbine High School massacre, a catastrophe so ghastly that it, too, seemed certain to inspire real change to the nation’s bizarre gun laws and culture.
But it’s demoralizing that 14 years after mentally ill gunman James Holmes sneaked into the Century 16 movie theater, killing 12 people and injuring 70 more, using semi-automatic guns and more, that the struggle to pass and implement common-sense gun-control and safety laws is still seemingly insurmountable.
Since July 20, 2012, another 753 people have been murdered during another 105 mass shootings across the nation, according to a database created by Mother Jones magazine after years of investigation. Another 1,258 people were injured during those mass shootings.
Of course, this all pales in comparison to the far more than 1 million Americans dead or injured from gun violence outside of mass shootings since the Aurora theater massacre.
Every day, an average of 327 Americans are shot and injured with a gun, and of those shootings, 117 of the victims die, according to Brady United research.
Americans are 26 times more likely to be shot than citizens of any other modern Western nation.
Rather than limit access to guns, gun-rights extremists point to a need to lock down schools, or lock up mentally ill people, or just deal with it as the price we must pay to live in a “free” society.
It isn’t that the United States is incapable of ending not just rampant mass murders. The nation also is unwilling to stem the leading cause of childhood death among Americans: gun violence.
We have refused to limit the power and abundance of American firearms.
We permit virtually anyone older than 18, not yet old enough to drink beer, to obtain weapons designed for use in war or policing, engineered to efficiently and rapidly kill other human beings.
One of the most popular firearms in the nation right now is a faux-assault rifle, designed as military weapons. They’re among the most popular weapons, too, among gangs and other criminals across the United States, and a favorite in criminal shootings near and far from Aurora.
Congress and state governments have refused to require gun owners to prove their ability to safely wield and store a weapon that is so deadly it can kill dozens or even hundreds of people in minutes, yet we require extensive licenses to drive a car and even cut hair.
We refuse to limit how many semi-automatic firearms a gunman can own, yet we limit cats to five per household.
Few states are like Colorado, which at least limits firearm magazines to 15 rounds, more than enough to create a massacre without ever changing a clip. Most other states allow highly efficient semi-automatic weapons loaded with massive magazines to operate as virtual machine guns, allowing gunmen to take out dozens of people in a store, a school or even at a parade, all within seconds. And they do.
But even here in Colorado, where lawmakers like state Sen. Tom Sullivan heroically keep pushing for common sense gun control legislation at the Capitol — his son, Alex, was among the 12 victims slain during the Aurora theater shooting — it’s taken nearly two years for a passed and signed bill outlawing guns using detachable ammo magazines to be enforced. Even almost a decade after a magazine ammo-limit measure was passed, magazines that hold more than 15 rounds are still readily available across the state.
But Colorado’s best laws do little to address the flood of illicit weapons brought to Colorado from other states.
Across the nation, we allow virtually anyone a loophole to bypass background checks to buy a gun, even several of them, without regard for their criminal pasts or their current mental illness.
As of July, as many as 60% of all Americans want stricter gun control laws, including meaningful universal background checks, according to a recent Gallup poll. A stunning 93% of all Americans believe all gun owners should be subject to universal background checks.
With so much overwhelming need and desire to control guns and gun deaths, it’s appalling that 14 years have passed since the Aurora theater shooting and so little meaningful progress has been made.
Guns are an approximate $20 billion-a-year industry, several sources estimate. Gun-rights groups outspend gun-control groups 6 to 1 in lobbying members of Congress and state lawmakers, according to a host of gun-control research organizations.
It’s not just money. Gun rights play heavily into partisan primary races. For Republicans, that means that the most extreme voters often call the shots in primary races, ensuring gun-rights interests are backed by acquiescent winning candidates.
In efforts to stay elected in swing congressional and legislative districts, many Democrats shy away from gun-control issues to keep their positions.
Despite the consistent and growing desire for gun control, elected leaders won’t deliver it, and voters won’t make them.
It’s clear, mass shootings and rampant gun violence will continue for the next 14 years unless voters choose legislative and congressional candidates who will make gun control happen instead of rationalizing why it won’t.
No other democratic, Western nation lives like this. We don’t have to either.
There are over 400 million firearms in circulation. Hindering or Preventing new sales will not dent that number for generations. The risk cannot be significantly reduced in my lifetime and so I oppose the ineffective laws that are on the table.
Brilliant.
Thanks to the late Antonin Scalia’s invention of a hitherto nonexistent constitutional “right”, and the refusal to face what the Framers were actually doing when they wrote the Second Amendment, the body count will only grow.
The Constitution did something many argued against – it established a national army. This was quite controversial – a national army was feared by many. But the Constitution nonetheless established one.
As for the militia, it was also preserved. Standing armies were thought by many to be a threat, and the militia was envisioned as a substitute for an army by some, though the Constitution kept both institutions.
The “right of the people to keep and bear arms” was synonymous with the civilian “militia”. My father was a member of the country’s oldest militia, The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. And the Second Amendment’s reference to “the people” reflects the country’s reliance on state-run militias since long before the Constitution was written.
What the Second Amendment DIDN’T do was sanction firearms possession as an individual right outside of militia service. And it didn’t mandate that we must tolerate the levels of death and violence that we put up with now. Regulation of private firearms use and possession remains a right of every state.
Jeff,
You’re not going to convince anyone that the second amendment was somehow the only outlier in the Bill of Rights that designated a “collective right” rather than an individual right. It is indeed an individual right. It protected the “right of the people to keep and bear arms”; the militia clause in the second amendment provisions for ordinary able-bodied males in the country to assemble for the common defense, which is predicated first by their ability to ensure self defense with their personal arms. Please refer to the grammatical analysis of the second amendment conducted by A.C. Brocki in 1991 to better understand its command.
As to how you feel about the current state of the militia, understand that the federal government, including via the Miller Act of 1903, still acknowledges the existence and role of the “unorganized militia”, which is composed of all able-bodied males between 18 and 45 years of age. Regarding state firearm laws, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the individual right guaranteed by the second amendment in Heller (2008), McDonald (2010), Caetano (2016), Bruen (2022), etc. Furthermore, several states include some individual right analogous to the second amendment in their own constitutions.
While gun violence and violent crime of any nature disappoints a society, we should caution ourselves against accepting creeping disarmament sold through a disingenuous framing of the second amendment.
Jefftard has been pushing the long-debunked Bellesiles thesis from “Arming America” for several years now, because his team believes individual gun ownership should be completely outlawed, and only government agents working exclusively in the interest of the Democratic Party should be allowed to use guns. Tom Sullivan believes the same thing, but knows he can’t actually come out and say it, so he salami slices those rights away instead.
And to little effect, of course, because Colorado’s combination of altitude sickness and drug addiction culture ensures that it will remain the Mass Shooting State.
The Supreme Court is hardly infallible.
In the Old West, visitors and residents to Dodge City were required to walk the streets unarmed. And it was not the only jurisdiction to do so.
And, strangely, no one thought it anything but prudent.
The Second Amendment guaranteed (and still does) the right of the people to maintain militias independent of the army for the local defense. That’s why the Amendment reads as it does.
“The Supreme Court is hardly infallible.”
Strawman.
“In the Old West, visitors and residents to Dodge City were required to walk the streets unarmed. And it was not the only jurisdiction to do so.”
In the Old West, you were not forbidden from owning firearms. And the restrictions were to allow advantages to the very law enforcement entities that your team despises and wants to eliminate.
“The Second Amendment guaranteed (and still does) the right of the people to maintain militias independent of the army for the local defense.”
The Second Amendment was crafted out of the common practice of individuals owning their own firearms. That you continue to lie by omission that this wasn’t the case simply further reinforces the disingenuousness of the gun-grabbers.
Jeff, You’re not going to convince anyone that the second amendment was somehow the only outlier in the Bill of Rights that designated a “collective right” rather than an individual right. It is indeed an individual right. It protected the “right of the people to keep and bear arms”; the militia clause in the second amendment provisions for ordinary able-bodied males in the country to assemble for the common defense, which is predicated first by their ability to ensure self defense with their personal arms. Please refer to the grammatical analysis of the second amendment conducted by A.C. Brocki in 1991 to better understand its command. As to how you feel about the current state of the militia, understand that the federal government, including via the Miller Act of 1903, still acknowledges the existence and role of the “unorganized militia”, which is composed of all able-bodied males between 18 and 45 years of age. Regarding state firearm laws, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the individual right guaranteed by the second amendment in Heller (2008), McDonald (2010), Caetano (2016), Bruen (2022), etc. Furthermore, several states include some individual right analogous to the second amendment in their own constitutions. While gun violence and violent crime of any nature disappoints a society, we should caution ourselves against accepting creeping disarmament sold through a disingenuous framing of the second amendment.
Numerous constitutional scholars also disagree with your interpretation. For example, Garry Wills, Carl T. Bogus, and the late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
It is unlikely you are going to cite a constitutional scholar I haven’t read in my research.
Something I didn’t address in your post: I didn’t say the Second Amendment was an “outlier”, nor did I say it couldn’t be a “collective right”, which would be foolish as the right encompasses the state militias, clearly group institutions. Of all such forces, the militias were closest to the people. (Though, to be accurate, not well-respected by Washington.)
I’ll give you points for laughs: grammatical analyses expose far more difficulties for “individualists” than the generalists. But all of this is the kind niggling obsession with grammar that the individualists reach for in place of common sense.
You reliance on the late gun nut and Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s evangelical zeal in rewriting, or just ignoring, history.
A few things about legal opinions: They are NOT written by historians. Indeed, there is no requirement that a justice be familiar with Early American history. And boy, does it show. (The derogatory phrase “law office history” isn’t simply snark.)
At any rate, your arguments are superficial and weak. In a contest between, say, you and Garry Wills, I’ll take Wills any day.
Along with the many, many historians and legal scholars who disagree with the Scalia approach.
“But all of this is the kind niggling obsession with grammar that the individualists reach for in place of common sense.”
So, the letter of the law only applies when it supposedly supports your political belief. Hilarious.
“You reliance on the late gun nut and Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s evangelical zeal in rewriting, or just ignoring, history.”
Citing actual gun ownership practices is hardly “rewriting history,” although it’s always notable that you’re still appealing to the long-debunked Bellesiles thesis, which actually was “ignoring history” in favor of a political narrative already assumed by the people who hate anyone that might put up an actual fight against their idiotic political theology.
Ending it with the typical appeal to authority and appeal to popularity certainly reinforces why nothing you state should be taken at face value.
If I recall, the killer specifically chose that theater because it has a no firearms policy and he figured he was unlikely to encounter a theater goer with a gun there.