Colorado has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, but those measures failed to prevent the horrific shooting in Boulder this week.
The universal background check on Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa didn’t flag his assault conviction to stop him from buying the gun on March 16.
Reports don’t indicate whether the Ruger AR-556 pistol had a large capacity magazine. If it did, the suspect couldn’t have purchased it in Colorado because such sales are banned.
Did the suspect know of Boulder’s assault weapons ban, which a judge had yet to overturn when Alissa purchased the gun?
There’s talk Colorado Democrats want to pass an assault weapons ban. We’re not hopeful that’s the solution.
The 2013 law requiring universal background checks including private transfers didn’t stop him from buying a gun.
We don’t know where the suspect bought the gun, but it’s unlikely it was purchased through a so-called gun show loophole because police were able to verify the purchase in their system.
Interviews with family members indicates the suspect was paranoid and may have suffered from mental illness.
A family member reportedly took the gun away form him, but gave it back.
It appears Colorado’s Red Flag law was never even considered.
Almost all of these laws in Colorado have been on the books for eight years, so it’s not like the measures haven’t had time to work.
So the question that remains: Did his own family get Alissa the medical treatment for any mental health issues he required?
Because that seems to be the common thread in mass shootings. The shooters were not exactly operating on all eight cylinders. They were not the picture of good mental health.
The crimes for which Alissa is charged are not the acts of a sane person.
And yet the only solution politicians are once again bringing to the table to address such insane atrocities are more of the same gun laws that didn’t work. There’s a word for doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.
Colorado has become the poster child of ineffectual gun laws.
So pursuing these same laws on a federal level is not the solution to stopping mentally ill people from committing crazy, horrendous crimes.
Mentally ill people do not stop to take the law into consideration when conspiring to destroy their imaginary enemies.
And yet President Biden has asked Congress — the people who have surrounded themselves with barbed wire and armed soldiers — to pass an assault weapons ban.
Will it be as ineffectual as the 1994 assault weapons ban passed by Congress that expired in 2004?
The same ban that failed to prevent 15 mass shootings, including Columbine?
Biden has also called for national background checks, like the one that didn’t prevent Alissa from buying his weapon.
The families of the victims absolutely deserve to see justice served and the perpetrator appropriately sentenced for his crimes. Colorado no longer has a death sentence, so the strongest penalty the family can hope for is life without parole.
What families don’t deserve is all the pandering from politicians pretending the issues they campaigned on anyway are the same ones that will give them peace and satisfaction that another mentally unstable person will never again commit mass murder — be it with gun powder, a machete, poison, or a bomb.