If you have a child in public school or college, you should be angry. We should all be furious today.
Don’t be lulled into some pathetic false sense of security that “it could have been worse.”
While there are so many unanswered questions in the school shooting Friday at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, we know for certain that an angry student dressed like a commando drove to his school, brazenly carried in a shotgun, opened fire and shot a student.
It doesn’t matter whether you think gun control might have prevented such a thing or whether anything that even remotely skirts the Second Amendment is as horrible as murder itself, a kid easily, quickly and without a problem was able to get a shotgun into a crowded high school.
And police are now saying that because of training and protocols, things weren’t so bad.
That’s crazy talk. It’s especially unnerving that this premature conjecture is coming from Sheriff Grayson Robinson. Robinson has long been renowned for his judiciousness. But Friday, Robinson said that he thinks 18-year-old Karl Pierson “took his life because he knew he had been found,” Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said.
Stop talking, Grayson.
While it’s amazing that a county sheriff department can rally the way it did, getting kids out of the building and using an on-site cop to quickly get to the shooter as part of an “active shooter” protocol, Robinson is irresponsible in implying to the public that, somehow, police now have handle on rampant school shootings and are able to contain or even prevent bloodshed.
Robinson and his deputies should be lauded for their courage and skill in getting to shooters faster, but that as a community implying that we should be pleased that we can reduce collateral damage during frequent school massacres is absurd. Is this the best we can hope for in this country now?
The kid had a shotgun, ammo and Molotov cocktails. It takes seconds — seconds — not minutes to unleash mass carnage with a gun. Perhaps a lengthy investigation will show this boy’s intent and culmination were different that what he’d hoped for, but at this point to say that “active shooter protocol” saved the day is wildly inappropriate. It could well be that after carrying through the first part of his plan, this boy realized the sadistic horror he had unleashed. In fact, this conjecture can go anywhere here. But it provides no comfort to Colorado for cops to tout the benefits of taking out shooters before more than a few children are massacred in public schools.
Neither the girl who was shot by Pierson nor her family are probably impressed by “active shooter protocol” today. This detracts from the biggest obscenity at all: Another school has been terrorized by a crazed gunman.
The irony of Newtown, Conn. parents remembering that school slaughter one year ago makes this particular school shooting — there were many others during the past year — even more painful.
And more infuriating than local government trying to put some kind of positive spin on yet another local shootout, is the immediate flood of anti-gun-control vitriol drowning media and social media websites.
It’s revolting that a wave of gun nuts are suggesting that arming other kids or teachers is a logical way of dealing with these school shootings.
Shut the hell up.
No doubt that Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and the NRA have plans already in motion to explain away our country’s disgusting preoccupation with guns and massacres.
Get mad. Mad that even after so many who have been murdered, terrorized and devastated during school and other public shooting massacres, they just keep on happening.
My feeling is, there wasn’t enough blood spilled at this shootout to push Colorado over the edge. Perhaps next time, because there will be a next time, Colorado will take the problem seriously enough to do something about it. Next time, it won’t be political radicals “recalling” lawmakers trying to do something, it’ll be the rest of us demanding legislators do something or get out.
Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com
What the hell is wrong with you?
You think what the sheriff said was inappropriate?? My goodness, talk about calling the kettle black. I cannot believe the Sentinel allowed this type of garbage to be posted.
Early into the details and as an innocent young woman clings to life you post this nonsensical political rant?? Thoroughly disgusting.
You are correct in the fact that when a bad person wants to do evil, seconds count. If the deputy had not been there, it would have taken several minutes for cops to get there. As the old adage goes, when seconds count, the cops are only minutes away. Abolish so called gun free zones and you take away soft targets. Posting a gun free zone sign is like a bank posting a no bank robbery zone sign.
I thought that perhaps Perry would have something intelligent to say, how stupid of me! I believe that I was misled by the headline which must have been written by a helper.