A city in the grip of terror

THE city of Boulder, Colorado, barred assault weapons in 2018, as a way to prevent mass shootings like the one that killed 17 at a high school in Parkland, Florida, earlier that year.

But 10 days after that ban was blocked in court, the city was rocked by its own tragedy: 10 people, including a Boulder police officer, were killed at a supermarket in the city’s south end on Monday after a gunman opened fire, law enforcement officials said.

A 21-year-old man faces 10 counts of murder in connection with Monday’s mass shooting at a Colorado grocery store, but his motive remains unclear, authorities said on Tuesday.

The suspect, identified by police as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa of Arvada, Colorado, was in stable condition after suffering a leg wound in an exchange of gunfire with responding police officers at the King Soopers outlet in Boulder, 45km northwest of Denver, on Monday. Police have yet to release any details about his weapon, how he purchased it, or if the ordinance would have prevented him from buying or possessing the weapon within city limits. Police said that he was reported to have been carrying a rifle.

Yet, for Dawn Reinfeld, co-founder of the Colorado gun violence prevention group Blue Rising,the “appalling” timing of the court decision was hard to ignore. “We tried to protect our city,” she said. “It’s so tragic to see the legislation struck down.” Rachel Friend, a city council member, said on Twitter that she was “heartsick and angry and mostly so, so sad.”

But the Colorado State Shooting Association, one of the plaintiffs that sued Boulder over the assault weapons ban, rejected that sentiment, arguing in a statement that “emotional sensationalism” about gun laws would cloud remembrance of the victims.

“I hope and pray we never have a mass shooting in Boulder,” City Attorney Tom Carr told the Daily Camera in March 2018. “What this ordinance is about is reducing, on the margins, the ease with which somebody could do that.” With unanimous support from the council, the law banned the possession, transfer and sale of most shotguns and certain pistols and semiautomatic rifles with pistol grips, a thumbhole stock, or any protruding grip that allows a weapon to be stabilized with the non-trigger hand. It also established a permit system for people who had previously owned any of those guns and banned large-capacity magazines, which it defined as “any ammunition-feeding device with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds.”

While city officials had acknowledged that the law faced likely legal challenges, they pointed to the city’s home-rule provisions as well as its history of trailblazing on liberal issues, like the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses. With few steps taken by state or federal government officials, “we had to start somewhere”, Reinfeld said.

On March 12, Boulder County District Judge Andrew Hartman sided with the plaintiffs, saying that, according to a 2003 Colorado state law, cities and counties cannot restrict guns that are otherwise legal under federal and state law. The “need for statewide uniformity favours the state’s interest in regulating assault weapons,” Hartman wrote. He said Boulder’s ordinance could “create a ripple effect across the state” by encouraging other municipalities to pass their own bans.

The National Rifle Association cheered the ruling on Twitter last week, noting that its lobbying arm had supported the lawsuit against the ban.

But in the wake of the Boulder shooting, gun violence prevention advocates said the importance of preserving such a ban had only become more evident.

Colorado Democratic state Rep. Tom Sullivan, who ran for office after his son Alex was killed in the Aurora movie theatre shooting, said he helped lobby the statehouse in Denver for background checks and magazine limits. Neither Congress nor the state legislature had the political capital to go as far as Boulder City Council.

“The assault weapons put the ‘mass’ in the ‘shootings,’” he told The Post. “That’s what gets the numbers up. That’s what gets the assault weapons that were able to fire as many rounds as were fired ... in the theatre, in the schools, in Parkland.”