20 years after Columbine shooting, little has been accomplished on gun control

The death toll is all too familiar, perhaps inevitable, at this point.

Virginia Tech, Virginia, 2007: 32 killed

Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut, 2012: 26 killed

Umpqua Community College, Oregon, 2015: nine killed

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Florida, 2018: 17 killed

Santa Fe High School, Texas, 2018: 10 killed

More than 200 lives have been claimed in American school shootings since the massacre at Columbine High School 20 years ago this week. That total doesn’t include hundreds more murdered in mass killings in nonschool settings, such as the 2017 Las Vegas shooting (58 killed) or the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Fla., the year before (49 killed).

Yet the ability to contain the loss of life from these tragedies remains stalled, as Second Amendment defenders and gun control advocates continue their faceoff in what has become an ossified and depressingly familiar impasse over gun violence in this country.

“We see the exact same discussion every time a mass shooting happens,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York in Oswego and an expert on mass shootings. “It’s talked about as control or as rights — it’s viewed as all or nothing.”

As a result, she said, little in the way of federal gun control legislation has passed since two students at Columbine shot and killed 12 fellow students and a teacher at the Jefferson County high school on April 20, 1999.

“If anything, federal regulations have gotten more lax,” Schildkraut said.

At the state level, the response has been more robust and varied across the country since Columbine, with legislation generally following the prevailing political allegiances of the state in which it is passed.

While 14 states, including Colorado, have passed “red-flag laws” — which allow the temporary removal of firearms from a person who has been deemed dangerous to themselves or others — other states are going the opposite way and expanding or strengthening concealed carry laws.

Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA, said the gun issue largely breaks along Republican vs. Democrat and urban vs. rural schisms.

“No issue makes clear the difference between red states and blue states like guns,” Winkler said.

Tom Mauser has been fighting for gun control legislation since his son Daniel was killed at Columbine. As a spokesman for Colorado Ceasefire, a gun control group that formed shortly after the shooting, he sees up close the passion guns and gun ownership engender. Even though his group doesn’t call for disarming Americans, he said gun rights groups often echo that refrain when rallying against legislation.

“We have a gun culture in this country — that’s a cultural thing and it’s not easy to change,” Mauser said, as he sat in the front row of his Littleton church during a recent interview. “They control the narrative. It’s about rights and it’s about confiscation. It’s all about fear.”

But Dave Kopel, an adjunct professor of constitutional law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and research director for the libertarian-leaning Independence Institute, said gun control groups have been pouring millions of dollars — led by billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — into a campaign to paint gun owners as extreme when all they are doing is safeguarding a basic constitutional right.

“There’s no question that anti-gun lobbies had a plan before Parkland, and implemented after Parkland, stigmatizing and demonizing gun owners and Second Amendment supporters in particular,” he said.

Measures struggle

The gun debate continues to play out against the unrelenting and bloody backdrop of gun-related killings in the United States, with the Gun Violence Archive documenting on the order of 12,000 to 15,000 gun deaths annually in this country since 2014.

Last year, 14,720 people died by a bullet in the U.S., according to the group. That figure does not include the more than 20,000 suicides by firearm that occur annually in this country. As these numbers have stayed stubbornly high, so have the passions on both sides of the issue.

That has made for a very uncertain legislative environment for measures designed to ratchet down the level of violence, even as gun rights advocates say those measures do nothing more than infringe on constitutional freedoms.

At the federal level, gun control has been halting at best since Columbine. There was 2007’s NICS Improvement Amendments Act, passed in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, that was designed to fortify elements of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. And last month, the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks — a device used by the Las Vegas killer to fire at a crowd outside his hotel with machine-gun efficiency — took effect.

But over the last two decades, many proposed gun control measures — even those sponsored by Republicans — have been stymied. One prominent effort repeatedly rebuffed over the years, Schildkraut says in her newly released book “Columbine: 20 Years Later and Beyond,” is a national measure requiring criminal background checks for all guns purchased at gun shows, not just those acquired from licensed dealers.

While Colorado voters overwhelmingly passed a gun-show loophole measure in 2000 after it was revealed that several of the Columbine killers’ firearms were purchased from private sellers at gun shows so as to avoid background checks, similar measures at the national level have gone nowhere.

“… Despite numerous attempts to close the gun-show loophole by members of both political parties, one of the most debated perceived causal factors for the Columbine shooting remains unaddressed 20 years later,” Schildkraut wrote.

Meanwhile, there have been a number of federal laws passed that buttress gun rights, including measures in the mid-2000s that required the FBI to destroy the records of approved gun buyers within 24 hours and that shielded gun sellers and manufacturers from lawsuits if their products are used in a crime.

The assault weapons ban signed into law by President Bill Clinton expired in 2004 and has not been renewed.

Guns in the “right hands”

Kopel said gun control proponents are looking at the issue the wrong way. Restricting overall access to firearms through gun control legislation largely hits law-abiding gun owners, he said, as criminals with intent to do harm will find a way to obtain weapons regardless of the law.

He points to the thwarted mass shooting at New Life Church in Colorado Springs in 2007 by a disgruntled 24-year-old Englewood man as a vivid example of why guns in the right hands can be instrumental in halting bloodshed. In that case, a security guard shot the shooter in the foyer of the church, wounding him, before he could move further into the building and claim more lives. Police believe the shooter then turned the gun on himself.

Columbine, Kopel said, changed the way law enforcement approaches an active shooter situation. Officers were heavily criticized after the 1999 massacre for waiting too long before entering the school, allowing the shooters to carry out their deadly plan with almost no resistance.

“I think Colorado and the nation have learned some lessons from Columbine — that guns in the wrong hands are very dangerous to public safety and guns in the right hands protect public safety,” he said.

John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and author of “More Guns, Less Crime,” said mass killers often choose a soft target or “gun-free zone” — such as schools — to carry out their attacks. That was true in South Carolina in 2015 when a gunman killed nine members of a black church during a Bible study class and three years earlier when a gunman killed 12 and wounded 70 in a movie theater in Aurora.

It was revealed at trial that the shooter had scouted the Century Aurora 16 theater multiple times and estimated how long a police response would take after he opened fire. According to the killer’s notebooks that police found after the shooting, he had ruled out attacking people at an airport because of “substantial security.”

“It at least shows that he was cognizant of armed security who might have been able to stop him,” Lott said. “These guys might be crazy but they’re not stupid.”

Concealed carry laws, he said, provide a critical level of protection for the public because it “takes away the strategic advantage of the killer.” That is as true in a school as in a movie theater, Lott said.

“If it were me, I would have a sign that would warn that there are select teachers that have concealed handguns to protect the school,” he said. “Make it so that a person, or multiple people, who are unknown to the attacker have a weapon that can stop him.”

President Donald Trump has called for arming teachers, and at least 30 school districts in Colorado, The Denver Post found last year, allow teachers or school staff to arm themselves. But Mauser thinks the idea of arming teachers is a bad one.

“Teachers need to be teachers and not security guards,” he said.

He worries about shooters firing at teachers first, with the assumption they are armed, or police officers targeting armed teachers in the chaos of an active event when it’s not yet clear who the bad guy is. And Mauser questioned how rigorously and how often teachers should be trained in the use of their weapons and where the guns would be safely stored at school.

Finding the line

Since Columbine, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed down two landmark decisions on gun ownership. The first — 2008’s District of Columbia vs. Heller — held that the Second Amendment ensures an individual the right to possess a firearm regardless of whether that person has any affiliation with a militia, striking down Washington, D.C.’s decades-old ban on handgun possession.

Two years later, the court ruled in McDonald vs. City of Chicago that the right to keep and bear arms applies to state law in the same way it does to federal law.

But in Heller, the court said: “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

Today, the battle over gun rights and gun control plays out in the nebulous area of what constitutes “in any manner” and “for whatever purpose.”

“Everybody is disagreeing with where the line is,” said Scott Moss, a constitutional law professor at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. “Everybody agrees that the right to bear arms doesn’t mean you have the right to arm yourself with a nuclear missile. (Some constitutional rights) are yes, no — some are more of a spectrum.”

For many gun control backers, the prohibition on sheer destructive power should apply to semi-automatic weapons like the popular AR-15, which has been the firearm of choice in several high-profile mass shootings of the past decade. But the powerful National Rifle Association has defended the weapon as “America’s Rifle” and two Democratic lawmakers in Colorado felt the wrath of those opposed to the state’s 15-round magazine limit, passed in 2013, by getting ousted in historic recall elections after voting in favor of the measure.

Experts interviewed for this story don’t see a happy medium on the issue coming any time soon.

“It’s difficult to see Congress compromise on guns when it can’t compromise on anything,” said Winkler, of UCLA. “We’re probably not going to see anything significant at the federal level any time soon.”

In late February, the Democratic-controlled House passed a measure requiring federal background checks for all firearms sales and transfers, but politics watchers say there’s little chance the bill will get through the GOP-led Senate or survive a presidential veto. At the state level, CU Boulder’s Moss said Colorado’s tilt to the left in the last few election cycles doesn’t necessarily track with the public’s view on guns — an issue that tends to create deeply entrenched positions.

“It’s not clear that Colorado’s progressive streak is extending to guns, like it has to LGBT rights,” he said. “I’m not convinced guns are an area where people change their minds a lot.”

The extreme risk protection order — or red flag — bill that was just signed into law got steep pushback in the form of resolutions from several counties, including Weld, Otero and Fremont, in which they declare themselves Second Amendment sanctuary counties where law enforcement is excused from enforcing the new restriction on gun ownership.

But Mauser hasn’t lost hope that sensible measures can move forward. He took heart at the energy and advocacy against gun violence displayed by students in Parkland, following the Valentine’s Day shooting at the South Florida high school last year.

“It has to be the young people taking this on, because my generation has failed,” he said.

Universal background checks and red flag laws may present a level of inconvenience to people trying to lawfully purchase or possess a firearm, but Mauser said that is a reasonable price to pay for maintaining public safety in a country that sees tens of thousands of gun deaths a year.

“Sure, it’s a hassle,” he said. “It’s hassle to bury your kid, too.”