Violence not inevitable

The grocery store shooting that killed 10 people in Boulder Monday has driven home what we’ve long suspected: Today America is a country where every resident must be prepared at all times for a deadly assault.

Americans once enjoyed domestic peace. The Columbine High School massacre in 1999 was an anomaly of such historic proportions that the entire world watched in horror. Too much evil has occurred since then, and Colorado has received more than its share of senseless violence.

On Monday when shoppers heard gunfire in the King Soopers in Boulder, it was as though the inevitable had occurred. “It seemed like all of us had imagined we’d be in a situation like this at some point in our lives,”î James Bentz, a survivor of the tragedy told Denver Post reporters.

And so, Americans must decide if we are OK living with the fear that someday we too might lose someone we hold dear at the hands of a mass killer. Because while we cannot prevent every mass shooting, or drive-by, or suicide, or accident, we can implement policies that would make these tragedies rarer and less deadly.

In the coming days, we will learn more about what happened Monday.

Some of the details will matter a great deal — the stories of those who died.

Some of the details will be hard to turn away from, but they won’t matter.

Knowing the shooter’s name and his motive won’t bring back the dead or stop the hurt felt throughout the Boulder community.

And some details will be critical.

Colorado closed the gun show loophole after Columbine. We learned there were warning signs that psychiatrists needed to report to authorities from the Aurora theater shooting. Claire Davis’ family pushed Arapahoe High School after the 17-year-old was shot and killed to take future threats of violence seriously. And the STEM shooting taught us all the consequences of not having firearms stored securely enough from those who could be dangerous.

There will be time to grieve as a community, lessons to learn and vulnerabilities to patch up.

We pray this never happens again, and if that’s not possible in today’s America then we pray for the resolve to never let this become ordinary, to never give up the hope that a more tranquil world could exist. We must all be prepared for a deadly assault like the one in Boulder on Monday, but we don’t have to pretend