PERRY — Listen to the experts, the cure for gun violence can only come from prevention

The metaphor for living in the Aurora-Denver area tells the story about our growing and rational fear of being shot to death.

Metropolitan areas are like bodies. Gun violence is like cancer. You can see where this is going.

Don’t think that a cancerous shooting during rush hour on I-25 at Sixth Avenue or behind a store in central Aurora doesn’t threaten you. It does. It imperils all of us. 

That’s the takeaway made clear by a host of community leader-type folks this week in Denver focusing on ending, or at least slowing, ghastly gun violence in the region.

The June 12 meeting was spearheaded by John Bailey, who leads the Colorado Black Round Table. There, Denver’s newly elected mayor, Mike Johnston, that city’s police chief, Ron Thomas, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, Aurora NAACP president Omar Montgomery, Denver DA Beth McCann, a bevy of school board directors, state lawmakers, educators and other elected and appointed community officials talked about the cancer of gun violence, especially among kids in the region.

Hanging over the meeting was the recent Aurora police shooting of 14-year-old Jor’Dell Richardson.

Police say Richardson and a few other teens stole vaping canisters from a small Aurora store, flashing what appeared to be a gun. Police rolled up, two of them chased Richardson and shot him in the abdomen while arresting him.

The details surrounding the shooting, and what led up to it, are mired in the Aurora police confusion and malpractice APD suffers when it comes to relaying news about police shootings and brutality.

Reporting by the Sentinel, Colorado Sun and Channel 9 news are now providing real transparency into the tragedy after Aurora police officials tried to bend the story, most likely for their own political purposes.

What’s clear, however, is that a boy that by all accounts of those who knew him, taught him and lived with him was among those considered least likely to be caught up in the deadly regional cancer of gun violence.

It will be months until investigators can factually determine how and why Jor’Dell came to be inside an Aurora shop with a pellet gun, then ran from police and was shot dead in a nearby alley.

By then, dozens of kids, or more, will be stricken or killed by our metropolitan cancer.

The message delivered by the Black Round Table participants isn’t that we should ignore the critical problem of how law enforcers treat and interact with people of color, and especially children of color, but we can’t be distracted by it either.

The cancer in our community is caused by opportunity. 

Kids whose lives are filled with opportunities for summer swimming, playing baseball, making art in a museum, playing a guitar or learning to fly a plane have little time or interest in messing with guns and “manning up” inside a car against other kids messing with guns, and looking for a place and a reason to use them.

Kids afforded endless opportunities to fill their days and lives risk becoming problems for their parents because they won’t clean their rooms, put down their phones, take out the trash or fill the dog bowl with water.

Kids without those opportunities risk becoming problems for everyone, because those bored, lonely and aimless kids are perfect opportunities for gang recruiters and the false but enticing sirens of gun play, said Terrence Roberts, who ran for Denver mayor.

Parents working endless hours against the forces of the cost of living in the metro area can’t afford or manage the classes and activities that capture the minds of other kids, so that new-style or old-style gang members or gun culture doesn’t fill the void.

It doesn’t mean that the kids of poor families are all doomed to become gun-toting menaces.

Panelist Marjorie Lewis, a Denver therapist and policy analyst, said “demonizing” people for being poor is as wrong and misleading to the public as any other kind of dangerous profiling.

“Being poor doesn’t mean you are a criminal,” she said.

It means that, as a community, we have a duty and a need to step up and make sure every kid has the opportunity to spend their days and nights doing things that are far more attractive to them, and all of us, than stealing cars or learning how to load guns.

It’s futile to spend huge resources uselessly trying to police ourselves out of gun violence, trying to adjudicate and incarcerate it from our community.

All of that fails to create a place we don’t fear getting shot at, killed at the grocery store or at the stoplight on Havana and Mississippi.

 We need to do much more to stop all that before it happens, rather than just run cops to the scene of the crimes to offer thoughts and prayers. 

Ask any doctor, it’s far wiser, and cheaper, and in every way better to prevent cancer, or catch it and treat it early, than it is to wait until it spreads.

Bailey and other panelists said the metroplex must focus on ensuring schools have the resources and additional programs to give kids a better option than gun violence.

And kids who look like they might become victims of our community cancer?

Identify and work with them early and fast to prevent the malady from becoming malignant and fatal.

Opportunities to work with kids in school or programs like Boys and Girls Clubs, before they get taken up in gun violence and even taken out by it, are far better answers to the problem than building more and bigger places to warehouse kids for the rest of their lives.

Schools, the nexus for everyone, need to evolve further to be the place where kids have the opportunities to be drawn into theater or video game development or fencing, and the opportunities for mental health treatment or meaningful counseling when problems are identified.

That costs time and money, which most schools don’t have.

But what Bailey and others want all of us to understand is, that money spent now to prevent the cancer of gun violence is pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of death, injury and trying to cure the “cancer” with courts and prisons after it metastasises into all of our lives.

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