Am I just plain nuts to think that I live in a safe and secure world? All the evidence says "perpetual vigilance" and "it can happen here" and "keep a close watch?
Let's look at the situation.
Our state has a violent history. In the far past: at Sand Creek in 1864, several hundred Cheyenne and Arapahos were brutally murdered. In 1914, a century or so ago, the Pinkertons, employed by the Rockefellers, killed no-one-knows-how-many miners when they shot randomly into the Ludlow tent colony.
More recently, killing has become the work not of army or paid professionals but of heavily armed civilians. In 1999 there was the horrible Columbine High School massacre in which twelve were killed and twenty-one wounded. Just thirteen years later came the mass killing inside a Century 16 theater in Aurora, just a few miles south of where I live, in which twelve people were killed and another seventy injured. Then in 2015 there was a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in which three were assassinated and nine others wounded. In March of 2021, just two years ago, in the Table Mesa King Soopers, a "gunman" killed ten -- customers, employees, a police officer. And last year, we had the nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs where five were murdered and twenty-five others wounded.
I didn't happen to be in any of these places, but I might have been. Although I wasn't at the Columbine school, I was at that very moment in a different classroom in Denver; I didn't go to the movies to see the Dark Knight, but I do go to theaters. It wasn't "my" King Soopers that was terrorized, but nevertheless I've bought stuff at that very store many times when I've happened to be in south Boulder; I wasn't at the Colorado Springs bar but I've certainly patronized bars. In any one of these cases, It could just as easily have been me that was shot dead or maimed. I've been one lucky fellow, but people much like me have not been so fortunate.
Two days ago, a vicious prank phone call set off a scramble and shelter-in-place warnings at two-block away Boulder High School. BHS is where AGP and our three children spent many a year. This scare turned out to be a case of "swatting" -- a disgusting new practice in which a nasty sociopath calls an institution to see if he can get a reaction from a SWAT team. Deliberate malice. Such false alarms are not mass killings, but they're still hair-raising, anxiety-provoking, and potentially dangerous events.
It's coming close to home, isn't it. Luck of the draw, so to speak, that I'm still whole.
When I was a teacher, I was never in real danger but, like everyone else on the faculty, I had a few deranged students. I remember once that a particularly odd young lady asked to make an appointment for a conference. Wary of her, I proposed that instead of her coming to my office that we meet in the public cafeteria. l can't remember what she wanted to talk about, but I recall vividly that at one point she asked, "do you think I have a gun in my purse?" I replied "I don't know whether you do or not, but I know that this meeting is now over." I stood up and walked away, half convinced that I was about to be shot in the back. But I wasn't.
It's a violent world; no one has ever been truly safe. But all we can do is go blithely about our business, hoping to be spared.
I shouldn't complain; we're not in a war zone; it's not like Ukraine, where at any moment Russian drones and shells and missiles can drop on you from the sky.
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