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Starr Samkus, a King Soopers employee, cries in front of King Soopers on March 23, 2021 in Boulder, Colorado. Samkus knew three of the victims who were killed in the mass shooting.
A mass shooting at a birthday party in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has renewed calls for increased regulation on firearms as national gun violence prevention measures remain at an impasse.
There have been 194 mass shootings in the first eighteen weeks of the year.
The shooting occurred at the Canterbury Mobile Home Community just after dusk on Sunday, May 10. Police say the twenty-eight-year-old gunman opened fire on six party guests before taking his own life. The suspected motive for the shooting is that the gunman was not invited to the party, possibly because of an altercation between the gunman and his girlfriend’s mother the week before.
This tragic mass killing was just a speck of the violence the country saw over Mother’s Day weekend. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there were more than 260 shootings in thirty-seven states that weekend. Taken together, the shootings resulted in ninety-four deaths and 236 injuries.
Similarly, a report by NPR found that there have been 194 mass shootings in the first eighteen weeks of the year. That total makes for a weekly average of ten shootings, meaning at least thirty people die each week due to gun violence.
For gun violence survivors like Maisha Fields, whose brother was murdered alongside his fiancé in 2005, the violence is a constant reminder of lawmakers’ failure to act on the issue.
“For the second time in under two months our state is again mourning victims of a mass shooting, by some measures the fourth deadliest mass shooting in Colorado history,” Fields, the vice president of organizing for the Brady Center, said in a statement. “We cannot accept this continued gun violence in our state and in our communities.”
Colorado has a particularly intimate history with mass shootings, dating back to the Ludlow Massacre on April 20, 1914. Then, the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company—owned by John D. Rockefeller—called in the National Guard to bust a strike by local coal miners. The militia opened fire on the workers in their camp and killed twenty-five people, eleven of whom were children.
The state is also home to some of the most infamous mass shootings in recent memory. There was the Columbine high school shooting in 1999, followed by the Aurora theatre massacre thirteen years later. Two months before the attack in Colorado Springs, a gunman opened fire in a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder. He killed ten people and injured two more.
To address the violence, Colorado state lawmakers have passed a number of bills that add additional restrictions on gun purchases, background checks, and transfer requirements. The Giffords Center on Gun Violence currently gives Colorado a C+ grade for its efforts to address gun violence. Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association ranks Colorado as one of the worst states for gun owners.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis has already signed two gun violence prevention bills into law so far this year. One bill outlines new safe firearm storage requirements for gun owners, while the other created penalties for failing to report lost or stolen firearms.
State lawmakers are also working to create the state Office of Gun Violence Prevention, an agency that would be tasked with “interrupting cycles of gun violence, trauma, and retaliation.”
Several challenges to gun control laws have come before the High Court since Heller, but the justices have generally punted on such cases—that is, until a more conservative ideological bloc was appointed.
While the exact toll of gun violence is difficult to measure, the latest data from the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence estimates that nearly 850 people in Colorado died because of gun violence in 2019. One in five of these deaths were the result of a homicide and the overwhelming majority were caused by suicide, the organization found.
“Our political leaders must act and prioritize this issue. Too many lives have been lost already, but we can stop further bloodshed now,” Fields said.
At the federal level, Democratic lawmakers have introduced a number of bills to address gun violence. However, bills like the Gun Violence Prevention Research Act of 2019 and the Community Safety Act of 2020 have been stuck in committee since soon after they were introduced.
This is despite the fact that nearly 60 percent of the public supports increasing gun control measures, according to a Gallup poll. Another 48 percent see gun violence as the top problem in the country today, the Pew Research Center found.
President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to curb gun violence. During his time as a U.S. Senator, he supported legislation that required background checks for gun sales and supported a high-capacity magazine ban for assault rifles.
Biden’s gun violence prevention plan includes provisions to ban the manufacturing or sale of assault weapons, strengthen the National Firearms Act, and keep people who have been convicted of hate crimes from owning weapons.
The Biden Administration unveiled its initial plan to address gun violence as a public health crisis in early April. Not long after, several state legislatures and municipalities have moved to protect gun rights.
For example, Idaho’s Republic Governor Brad Little signed a bill on May 11 that limits the Governor’s power to enforce any executive orders on gun control from the White House. Similarly, the Weld County Board of Commissioners in Weld County, Colorado, reaffirmed its status as a Second Amendment Sanctuary City, meaning it will not “adopt any ordinance which abridges or restricts a person’s individual right to bear arms,” according to the resolution.
One difficulty lawmakers in Colorado and elsewhere are facing is that nobody really knows what the term “gun rights” means. The Supreme Court has not clarified the individual gun rights it prescribed into law in its Heller v. District of Columbia decision thirteen years ago. During that time, the states have developed a patchwork regulatory environment that gun rights organizations have continuously sought to disrupt.
Several challenges to gun control laws have come before the High Court since Heller, but the justices have generally punted on such cases—that is, until a more conservative ideological bloc was appointed.
After Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 2020, the Supreme Court has agreed to take up two cases that seek to further expand gun rights. One case currently underway—New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett—seeks to invalidate a New York law that requires anyone who wants to carry a gun in the state to demonstrate a good reason for doing so.
Similarly, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York sought to overturn another New York law that prohibits the transportation of firearms outside of the city. The Supreme Court rejected the challenge as moot in late April and remanded it back to a lower court.
Brady Center President Kris Brown says the federal impasse on gun violence presents an opportunity for Colorado, and other states, to strengthen local authority to regulate firearms.
Brown points to Colorado’s Senate Bill 21-256 as an example. If passed, the bill would empower local jurisdictions to set their own firearm regulations. However, any ordinance or other measure passed cannot be less restrictive than current state law.
“This is a common-sense, public safety law,” Brown said in a statement, “that allows local governments to treat the gun violence epidemic in their communities by using specifically tailored policy solutions to protect their citizens.”