Boulder supermarket shooting

Gun reform laws eluded Biden in 2013. Could this showdown with the NRA be different?

March 25, 2021 by Staff Reporter

Within hours of 10 people being gunned down at the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado on Monday – the second such bloody rampage in seven days – the calls had begun for Congress to tighten up America’s notoriously slack firearms laws.

John Hickenlooper, a Democratic US senator from Colorado who was governor of the state at the time of the Aurora cinema shooting that killed 12 people in 2012, opined that “our country has a horrific problem with gun violence. We need federal action. Now.”

Gabby Giffords, a former congresswoman and leading gun control advocate who was shot in the head in 2011, remarked: “It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s beyond time for our leaders to take action.”

The most prescient comment came from Mark Barden, whose son Daniel was one of 20 six- and seven-year-olds shot dead at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in December 2012. His heart was with the grieving families of Boulder, he said, adding that he hoped this year the country would “finally expand access to background checks”.

That hope that real legislative change could finally be on the horizon belied the years of disappointment that have brought Barden and other gun law campaigners to this point. In April 2013, the Sandy Hook father stood beside Barack Obama in the Rose Garden of the White House hours after the US Senate had voted down a bill that would have introduced universal background checks on all gun sales.

It was a low point in America’s bleak history of political failure in the face of ongoing gun violence. If you can’t get Congress to pass such a rudimentary regulation as security checks on the purchasers of weapons just months after 20 young children have been shot at point-blank range with a military-style rifle, then when is possible?

A customer fills out a background check form in Orem, Utah. Photograph: George Frey/AFP/Getty Images

“This was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” a shaken and angry Obama said.

Standing in the Rose Garden directly behind Obama and Barden was the man entrusted with driving gun reform on to the statute books: Joe Biden. After the slaying of the school kids, Obama had given Biden the job of coming up with a plan for substantial legislation that would help prevent Sandy Hook happening again.

The mission was custom-made for the then-vice-president. As a father who had lost his daughter Naomi and first wife, Neilia, in a car crash in 1972, he had no dearth of empathy for the Sandy Hook families.

He also had an impressive record on gun reform in the US Senate, having played a leading role in passing the Brady Bill in 1993, which required partial background checks, and having drafted a ban on assault weapons enacted the following year (it expired in 2004).

So what went wrong? Why didn’t Biden achieve meaningful reform at a time when the nation was deeply traumatized by a horrifying slaughter of its children?

The question is pertinent now, eight years later, when Biden has vowed yet again to take on the gun lobby. On Tuesday the president called on Congress to “immediately pass” legislation that would close loopholes in the background check system and reimpose the ban on assault weapons – almost exactly the reforms he failed to push through Congress in 2013.

A clue to what happened was given in one of the first of many meetings that Biden held with interested parties to discuss his proposals. The encounter, held at the White House, was with the lobby group that posed the greatest threat to his efforts: the National Rifle Association.

At the time the NRA, with more than 4m members and an iron grip on lawmakers whom it ranked according to their voting records, was widely feared as the most powerful gun lobby in the world. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice-president, had just days before issued his response to Sandy Hook, proposing in typically acerbic fashion that the way to prevent further mass shootings was to place armed guards in all schools.

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said. In the ensuing months, gun sales soared.

By all accounts, Biden’s head-to-head with the NRA did not go well. The White House, the lobby group hissed, had “an agenda to attack the second amendment … We will not allow law-abiding gun owners to be blamed for the acts of criminals and madmen.”

Joe Biden crosses his fingers in response to a reporter’s question on gun reform laws the day after a mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

After that spluttering start, Biden went on to stage meetings with hundreds of other influential groups and individuals on either side of the gun divide. As an act of public consultation it was exemplary; as an effort at effective politics it was widely deemed to have crashed.

“If, by some chance, there could have been some reasonable bill on the floor [of the Senate] by January,” a Senate aide told Politico, there would have been “less time for people to sort of become ambivalent”.

Biden’s much-vaunted desire to be politically inclusive by reaching across the aisle cost him valuable time. In turn, that allowed the enormous energy unleashed by the horrifying events inside Sandy Hook elementary school to dissipate.

By the time the vote was held in April 2013, four months after the slaughter, the NRA had reasserted its grip over cowering Republican senators. In fact, four Democratic senators had joined them to vote against the bill to introduce universal background checks, which gained 54 votes to 46 but fell short of the 60 needed to avoid a filibuster.

Eight years on, Washington appears stuck in a scene out of Groundhog Day. Universal background checks are being talked about again in the wake of mass shootings, and all eyes are on Biden and the US Senate.

Five days before the Atlanta spa rampages, the House passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act by 227 votes to 203. The bill now passes to the Senate, setting up a repeat showdown that presents Biden with his greatest chance since 2013 to get things right.

Aspects of the tussle have tipped this time in his favor. Control of the Senate has passed from the gun-loving Republicans to Biden’s Democratic party.

The main roadblock, the NRA, has gone into a tailspin of scandal and financial calamity over the past 18 months that is likely to blunt its teeth as it tries to block the legislation.

The Senate battle ahead remains formidable, however, given that the chamber is evenly divided 50 seats to 50, and with the 60-vote filibuster yet again posing a daunting challenge. Biden finds himself in an all-too familiar place, seeking to drive through change against the odds with the hopes of so many bereaved families depending on the outcome.

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Boulder in fresh push to ban assault rifles as city reels from mass shooting

March 24, 2021 by Staff Reporter

Boulder authorities will make fresh attempts to ban assault rifles as the Colorado city is “just beginning” to grieve after 10 people were killed in the mass shooting at a local supermarket on Monday afternoon.

The mayor of Boulder, Sam Weaver, said on Wednesday morning that the city is likely to appeal against a ruling just 10 days ago by a judge that blocked a ban on the weapons passed by the city in 2018 after a lawsuit that was supported by the National Rifle Association.

“We are still getting out of shock. It’s quite difficult to digest something like this happening in your backyard,” Weaver told CBS.

He said the city was likely to appeal the ruling on the assault weapons ban to the state supreme court.

“We will push on that, and we will also push our state legislature to put in a statewide ban,” he said.

The suspect accused of opening fire inside the crowded supermarket is a 21-year-old man who allegedly purchased an assault weapon less than a week earlier. Family members say they saw him with it a few days before the shooting.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa bought the weapon on 16 March, six days before the deadly attack at the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, according to an arrest affidavit.

“The grieving is just beginning,” Weaver said.

Vice-President Kamala Harris on Wednesday called on Congress to pass gun control legislation.

“We are seeing tragedy after tragedy after tragedy … it’s time for Congress to act,” she told CBS TV, indicating that permanent legislation – an uphill battle in the Senate despite bills being passed in the House – was preferred to executive action by Joe Biden.

Well after dark, and in the chill on Tuesday night, about 100 people mourned at a makeshift memorial near the grocery that was adorned with wreaths, candles, banners reading “#Boulderstrong” and 10 crosses with blue hearts and the victims’ names. Therapy dogs were on hand to provide comfort.

Four young girls huddled in the cold, one of them crying as she reminisced about how they had protested against the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida. Others recalled the 1999 shooting at Columbine high school and the 2012 Aurora movie theater attack.

Kamala Harris in Washington on Tuesday. Photograph: Ken Cedeno/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock

Weaver said the Boulder city council was due to hold a special meeting on Wednesday evening, and the council is to receive advice from experts on how to help the city recuperate from the tragedy. There is expected to be a formal vigil on Thursday evening.

The patrol car that Eric Talley, the police officer who died, drove to the supermarket as he was the first to respond to the shooting, has become an informal memorial, parked outside the police department and adorned with flowers and tributes.

Three of the dead are understood to have worked at the supermarket.

Kim Cordova, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, which represents more than 30 store employees, said workers did their best to get customers to safety.

“They grabbed everybody they could, and they brought them to the backroom or to other areas of the store to hide, or got them out through the back dock,” Cordova said.

“And these poor grocery workers have just been through hell in general working through Covid this entire last year of the pandemic.”

The suspect is due on court on Thursday. He has been described by family members as prone to angry outbursts and delusions, and has mental illness.

He had been suspended from high school for a sudden attack on a classmate that left the student bloodied. A police affidavit said he punched the student several times.

Alissa “got up in classroom, walked over to the victim and ‘cold-cocked’ him in the head”, the affidavit read. Alissa complained that the student had made fun of him and called him “racial names” weeks earlier, according to the affidavit.

A police report on the incident said the victim was bloodied and vomiting after the assault. Alissa was suspended from school and sentenced to probation and community service.

One of his former high school wrestling teammates, Angel Hernandez, said Alissa became enraged after losing a match in practice once, letting out a stream of invective and yelling he would kill everyone. Hernandez said the coach kicked Alissa off the team for the outburst.

“He was one of those guys with a short fuse,” Hernandez said. “Once he gets mad, it’s like something takes over and it’s not him. There is no stopping him at that point.”

Alissa, who is from the Denver suburb of Arvada, was booked into jail on Tuesday on murder charges.

Investigators have not established a motive in the shooting, said the Boulder county district attorney, Michael Dougherty. It was not immediately known where the suspect purchased the weapon.

After the shooting, detectives went to Alissa’s home and found his sister-in-law, who told them that he had been playing around with a weapon she thought looked like a “machine gun” about two days earlier, according to an arrest affidavit.

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Boulder shootings: suspect allegedly bought assault rifle after ban on sale was blocked

March 23, 2021 by Staff Reporter

The suspect accused of opening fire inside a crowded Colorado supermarket was a 21-year-old man who allegedly purchased an assault weapon less than a week earlier, it has emerged.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa bought the weapon on 16 March, six days before the attack at a King Soopers store in Boulder that killed 10 people, including a police officer, according to an arrest affidavit. It was not immediately known where the gun was purchased.

The shooting came 10 days after a judge blocked a ban on assault rifles passed by the city of Boulder in 2018. That ordinance and another banning large-capacity magazines came after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead.

A lawsuit challenging the bans was filed quickly, backed by the National Rifle Association. The judge struck down the ordinance under a Colorado law that blocks cities from making their own rules about guns.

Alissa, who is from the Denver suburb of Arvada, was booked into the county jail Tuesday on murder charges after being treated at a hospital. He was due to make a first court appearance Thursday.

Investigators have not established a motive for Monday’s attack, but they believe Alissa was the only shooter, Boulder county district attorney Michael Dougherty said.

A law enforcement official briefed on the shooting said the suspect’s family told investigators they believed Alissa was suffering some type of mental illness, including delusions. Relatives described times when Alissa told them people were following or chasing him, which they said may have contributed to the violence, said the official, who wished to remain anonymous.

The attack was the nation’s deadliest mass shooting since a 2019 assault on a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where a gunman killed 22 people in a rampage that police said targeted Mexicans.

In Washington, president Joe Biden called on Congress to tighten the nation’s gun laws.

“Ten lives have been lost, and more families have been shattered by gun violence in the state of Colorado,” Biden said at the White House.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer vowed to bring forward two House-passed bills to require expanded background checks for gun buyers. Biden supports the measures, but they face a tougher route to passage in a closely divided Senate with a slim Democratic majority.

Supermarket employees told investigators that Alissa shot a man multiple times outside the Boulder grocery store before going inside, according to the affidavit. Another person was found shot in a vehicle next to a car registered to the suspect’s brother.

The gunfire sent shoppers and employees scrambling for cover. SWAT officers carrying ballistic shields slowly approached the store while others escorted frightened people away from the building, which had some of its windows shattered. Customers and employees fled through a back loading dock to safety. Others took refuge in nearby shops.

Multiple 911 calls paint a picture of a chaotic, terrifying scene, according to the affidavit.

One caller said the suspect opened fire out the window of his vehicle. Others called to say they were hiding inside the store as the gunman fired on customers. Witnesses described the shooter as having a black AR-15-style gun and wearing blue jeans and maybe body armor.

By the time he was in custody, Alissa had been struck by a bullet that passed through his leg, the affidavit said. He had removed most of his clothing and was dressed only in shorts. Inside the store, he had left the gun, a tactical vest, a semiautomatic handgun and his bloodied clothing, the affidavit said.

No one answered the door at the Arvada home believed to be owned by the suspect’s father. The two-storey house with a three-car garage sits in a relatively new middle- and upper-class neighborhood.

Monday’s attack was the seventh mass killing this year in the US and came a few days after the shooting that left eight people dead at three massage businesses in Georgia.

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US gun-safety groups call for urgent action after Colorado shooting

March 23, 2021 by Staff Reporter

After recording a year with the lowest level of public mass shootings in more than a decade, the US suffered its second such incident in less than a week on Monday night with a shooting at a Colorado grocery store that killed 10, including one police officer.

Gun safety advocates including former president Barack Obama called for immediate action by Congress to address the resurgent national epidemic as the country emerges from a year of lockdowns and social distancing sparked by the coronavirus pandemics.

In remarks at the White House, Joe Biden called for a new ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and said the Senate “should immediately pass” legislation to close loopholes in the background checks system for the purchase of guns.

The Republican minority in the Senate is highly likely to block any action on gun control. Nonetheless, senators on the Democratic side echoed Biden’s call to action.

“This is the moment to make our stand. NOW,” tweeted Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, where a shooter killed 26 people at an elementary school in 2012.

A male suspect was arrested at the scene, a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado. He was named on Tuesday, as were the 10 victims.

“This is a tragedy and a nightmare for Boulder county, and in response, we have cooperation and assistance from local, state and federal authorities,” said the Boulder county district attorney, Michael Dougherty.

The Colorado attack brought the week’s death toll from mass public shootings to 18, after a gunman killed eight people at three Atlanta-area spas last Tuesday. Six of those victims were women of Asian descent, and that attack produced a national demand for reckoning with discrimination and violence directed at Asian Americans.

While racist scapegoating by Donald Trump and others sparked thousands of attacks against Asian Americans during America’s pandemic year, 2020 was an unusually quiet one for mass public shootings, according to a database maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.

There were 10 such shootings in 2018 and nine in 2019, according to the database, which tracks public incidents in which at least four people died, not including the shooter.

The US suffered only two such incidents in 2020 – both at the start of the year, before the spread of the coronavirus led to local economic and school shutdowns and related restrictions.

Gun sales surged during the pandemic, leading to fears of a return of mass gun violence after coronavirus restrictions eased. Those fears appear to have been fulfilled already.

“We have had a horrific year as a country, as a world,” Colorado’s state senate majority leader, Stephen Fenberg, a Democrat, told MSNBC. “It had finally started to feel like things are getting back to ‘normal’. And, unfortunately, we are reminded that that includes mass shootings.”

The police officer killed in the Colorado store attack, Eric Talley, 51, the father of seven children, was the first to respond to reports of shots fired at the store, authorities said.

The attack came just days after a judge blocked Boulder from enforcing a two-year-old ban on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines in the city.

“The court has determined that only Colorado state (or federal) law can prohibit the possession, sale and transfer of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines,” wrote the county judge, Andrew Hartman, according to the Denver Post.

While no state is untouched by mass shootings, Colorado has had an especially difficult history of such incidents, beginning with an attack on students at a high school in Columbine in 1999 that killed 13. In Aurora in 2012, a gunman fired at a crowd watching a Batman movie, killing 12 and wounding 58.

As previously scheduled, the Senate judiciary committee held a hearing Tuesday on “constitutional and common sense steps to reduce gun violence”. Gun safety legislation has failed to gain traction in Congress despite wide public agreement about certain safeguards such as universal background checks.

“To save lives and end these senseless killings, we need more than thoughts and prayers – we need federal action on gun safety from the Senate, and we need it now,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “That work begins with this hearing, and we cannot rest until we pass background checks into law.”

Murphy, who does not sit on that committee but who mounted a nearly 15-hour filibuster on the Senate floor in 2016 to advance gun safety legislation after 49 people died in a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida, called on colleagues to finally address gun violence.

Murphy invoked Monday’s shooting in Boulder, a mass shooting at a Florida high school in 2018 that killed 17 and the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

“No more Newtowns. No more Parklands. No more Boulders,” he tweeted. “Now – we make our stand.”

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