Certain Colorado shootings prompt change

Other gun deaths don’t get same response

Eight people were fatally shot in Denver in the first week of July 2020, but no lawmakers called Jason Mcbride, a leader in gang violence prevention in Denver and Aurora, to ask what was happening. The silence continued the next week, when another eight died in shootings.

National news did not cover the violence and there were no citywide vigils. Nonprofits didn’t raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the victims, most were Black and Latino.

“Matter fact, the first 28 days of the year in 2020, we had a shooting every day,” Mcbride told The Denver Post. “And we’re sitting here in these communities screaming and crying because our babies are laying in the streets or behind bars. And it’s been like that, and no one has addressed it.”

That’s not the case when there’s a mass shooting like the one that claimed 10 lives last month in Boulder. Policymakers and activists then call for real action at the state Capitol or in Washington, D.C., as opposed to mere thoughts and prayers or nothing at all.

But mass shootings are exceptionally rare, with about three-quarters of all gun deaths in the state coming from suicides and most of the rest from so-called “community violence” incidents and accidents, accord