Three were killed and nine hospitalized in a shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood last Friday.
Two of the casualties were civilians and one was a police officer. The shooting occurred after about a six-hour standoff when suspect gunman Robert Lewis Dear (50) opened fire.
Dear was captured after the shooting and is being held without bail and the motive for the shooting remains unclear. However, when questioned by investigators, the suspect brought up "baby parts" and anti-abortion and government views. The FBI is now doing its own investigation of the incident in order to determine whether or not there will be federal charges.
Dear's car was found in the parking lot near the Planned Parenthood accompanied by propane tanks in the surrounding area. According to CNN, authorities believe Dear was attempting to shoot the propane tanks in order to cause an explosion.
But this story isn't just about the Colorado Springs shooting.
According to the Washington Post, as of October 1, there have been 294 mass shootings this year in the US alone.
As of that date, there had only been 274 days of 2015.
A mass shooting is defined as four or more people shot in one incident. So these records don't even include shootings of lower magnitude. This data is retrieved from the Mass Shooting Tracker, which tells us that "there is a mass shooting nearly every day." Nearly every day.
How have we become so immune to this type of inhumane violence? A violence that occurs much too often. And there's our answer... it occurs much too often.
After the Oregon school shooting that occurred October 1 of this year, President Obama commented that the shooting showed that the US gun violence response "has become routine." With mass shootings filtering through our newsstands nearly every day, our eyes have begun to glaze and the casualties have turned to numbers. This isn't insensitivity, this is an epidemic, a crisis.
America's gun crisis is dubbed a "crisis" in not just the severity but the frequency of these tragic events. And we as civilians have fallen into the "routine" that is these mass shootings. I'm not here to lecture about gun-control. This isn't about policy or opinion or just America. This is about the lives that we have become numb to, the lives that have so easily become numbers to many.
We, as individuals, as residents of this one planet, must take it upon ourselves to step out of routine. Profile pictures may be changed for one event but there are so many others occurring – so many more lining the pages of our past that routinely slip our minds.
Whatever your view may be on gun control, ask yourself what, then, is the problem? What, then, is the crisis at hand? Because these are, in fact, not just numbers, these are not events that should be routine headlines...these are lives. And what then, can we do as members of this democracy to break routine and fix the problem?
One of the Colorado Springs victims was a father of two daughters and Army veteran, another was a mother of two, and the officer was a six-year veteran of the university's police force. They are not numbers.
