Colorado Has a Gun Problem

Students at Overland High School in Aurora, Colorado, are lucky to be alive today.

According to police, a fight broke out Wednesday morning involving two girls, one of whom was reportedly dating the 16-year-old male suspect. Authorities say the juvenile pulled out a loaded gun during the altercation while trying to break up the fight. At that point another student yelled, “Gun, gun, gun.”

A school security coordinator saw the suspect running through the halls and tackled him to the ground until a school resource officer took him into custody. Police later said the teenager was carrying a loaded .40 caliber handgun and was arrested on suspicion of possessing a weapon on school grounds and being a juvenile in possession of a handgun.

Thankfully, no one was shot, which in America qualifies as a miracle.

Still, it is hard to ignore just how close this came to becoming another headline with a body count. A loaded .40 caliber handgun is not some tiny pocket pistol somebody absentmindedly forgot they had stuffed in a backpack. The .40 S&W cartridge was designed to hit harder than a standard 9mm round and for years was popular with law enforcement because it was seen as a compromise between firepower and magazine capacity.

Compared to a typical 9mm handgun, a .40 usually has more recoil, more muzzle snap, and delivers a heavier punch. This was not a toy. One small slip of the finger could have changed dozens of lives forever.

Then there is the question police still have not answered. Where did the gun come from?

Authorities said the gun had not been reported stolen, which narrows the possibilities down to two disturbing scenarios. Either the gun came from home, or the gun’s owner has no idea a loaded .40 caliber gun is missing. One possibility suggests unsecured firearms around minors, while the other points to carelessness that has become synonymous with ‘responsible gun owners’™.

Colorado keeps finding itself at the center of these stories, and at some point people have to admit this is not just random bad luck anymore. I don’t believe in the supernatural, but I swear Colorado is cursed when it comes to guns and mass violence.

Everybody immediately remembers Columbine, because how could they not? That shooting permanently burned itself into the American consciousness and practically rewrote how schools handle security. Yet Columbine was not the end of it. The state has seen attack after attack, threat after threat, and lockdown after lockdown until they all start to blur together in public memory.

Aurora alone carries a particularly grim reputation. This is the same city where the Century 16 theater shooting happened during a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” back in 2012. Twelve people were murdered in what should have been a normal movie night. The fact that another potentially catastrophic gun incident unfolded in the same city all these years later feels less shocking than it should, and that might be the most depressing part of all.

People often talk about Texas or Florida as if they exclusively own America’s gun culture problems, but Colorado absolutely belongs in that conversation too. The state has developed this strange reputation where it markets itself as outdoorsy, progressive, healthy, and modern while simultaneously producing an endless stream of horrifying stories involving firearms. School shootings, theater shootings, supermarket shootings, and school lockdowns that traumatize students before first period even ends.

Meanwhile, schools are expected to normalize this environment for students. Officials praised students and staff for following lockdown procedures exactly as trained. Mental health counselors were made available afterward. Classes resumed once police determined there was no active threat. Everybody said the right things because there is a script for this now. America has rehearsed it so many times that multiple generations of kids know how to barricade doors and hide silently in classrooms before they are old enough to drive. They have drills like school shootings are an act of nature instead of the aberration they should be treated as.

That should bother people more than it does.

The only reason this story did not end differently is that school staff reacted quickly and somebody physically stopped the suspect before panic turned into bloodshed.

That is not evidence the system is working. It’s evidence that mass violence was narrowly avoided. Again.

(Source)