Colorado residents are once again shocked and desolate and struggling to understand why mass shootings continue to happen in their state.
On Monday, a sniper killed 10 people at a grocery store in Boulder. The victims, including a police officer who responded to the scene, were aged between 20 and 65 years. A 21-year-old man was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder.
Boulder, a calm, “beautiful university town”, “is not the place where you would think of armed violence,” said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo.
“We are just feeling that we have had a disproportionate amount of armed violence,” DeGette said on Tuesday on MSNBC. “As someone who has been active in gun safety legislation, I am disconcerted that this is something that can happen again here in Colorado.”
Colorado ranked fifth in the country for most mass shootings since 1999 in a 2019 review by The Denver Post. Several of the shootings took place in a relatively small area, including Aurora, the site of a 2012 movie riot that left 12 people dead and dozens injured, and Littleton, where two senior high school students killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 21 other people at Columbine High School in 1999.
Other high-profile mass shootings include a 2007 attack on two churches in Colorado Springs and Arvada and a 2017 shooting at a Walmart Supercenter in the Denver suburb of Thornton.
The suspect in Monday’s shooting lived in Arvada, police said.
Experts are divided on why Colorado appears to have a disproportionate share of mass shootings, but contributing factors include a contagion effect from Columbine and easy access to firearms, they say.
“There is a combination of déjà vu and learned helplessness, because these problems seem very predictable and preventable,” said Dr. Jonathan Metzl, director of the Department of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “One of the key factors in all of these stories is how easy it was for people to get weapons.”
Monday’s shooting suspect, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, purchased a Ruger AR-556 on March 16, according to an arrest warrant statement. Court documents did not identify the weapon used in Monday’s shooting; witnesses described the killer as using an AR weapon, the statement said.
James Holmes, who was behind the Aurora shooting, bought his weapons legally in the months leading up to the attack. Columbine snipers bought their firearms from a friend, who bought them legally at a gun fair.
Monday’s mass murder came 10 days after a judge blocked the ban on assault rifles that the city of Boulder passed in 2018, the Associated Press reported. The decree and another ban on large-capacity magazines were passed in response to a mass shooting in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed.
“At the moment, it’s much easier to get an AR-15 in many parts of the country than it was even after Sandy Hook,” said Metzl, referring to the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were killed. “In a way, we make it easier for mass shooters.”
According to a 2016 study by Adam Lankford, a professor of criminology at the University of Alabama, mass shootings are more likely to happen in places where gun ownership is common.
He looked at 171 countries and concluded that the United States and other countries with high rates of possession of firearms are “particularly susceptible to future mass shootings”, even if they are peaceful.
“These are not the countries with the most murders or suicides,” he said. “It is the countries with the most firearms that have carried out the most mass shootings.”
Experts also point to two of the most notorious mass shootings in history, both in Colorado, as reasons why Colorado appears to have more public shootings.
The Columbine High School massacre became a cultural phenomenon not only because of the atrocities that took place there, but also because of the snipers, whose black raincoats and their reputation as strangers captured the public’s imagination.
Similarly, the Aurora shooting was centered around a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises”.
The shootings became cultural food, fueling the media frenzy that put the killers at the center of the stage, said Frank Farley, professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia and former president of the American Psychological Association.
“This stood out among other violent acts in America,” he said. “You even set the stage, maybe.”
While it is natural to look for patterns when the tragedy strikes, Farley also cautioned against “confirmation bias” or the tendency to interpret evidence as confirming existing beliefs or theories.
“We always have to be aware of this prejudice,” he said. “You think there may be something funny in Colorado, so you see things where you might not have noticed them before.”