It is difficult today for me to find something humorous to write about after what happened at the Henry Pratt Company in Aurora Friday. The senseless shootings takes a toll. I’d been at the business a few times while working at a photo shoot or designing elements for their trade show display. Unlike some of my other clients, the Pratt Company was three or four minutes away, which gave me easy access, close to home—too close as of now.
It is the opportunity for gun proponents and the NRA to say if the employees inside had guns, they could have taken the shooter down. Maybe so, maybe not. Should everyone carry a gun so we can recreate the old West and have shootouts whenever someone makes us angry, gets drunk and is belligerent toward us, cuts us off in traffic, or even looks at us the wrong way? The problem is, when everyone has a gun, the bad guys who want to steal your things won’t hold a gun on you while you hand over your goods. The possibility exists they may get shot. To eliminate that possibility they’ll just shoot you first and take your stuff anyway.
In my pre-army days, I had a girlfriend who was being stalked by an older guy in his mid-20s. He’d managed to scare away any of her potential boyfriends by confronting them as they left her house. She never knew why they’d disappear after a single date. I happened to be the one who returned to tell her what was going on. After a couple more increasingly-threatening attempts to scare me off, this guy jumped in my car one night when I was dropping my girlfriend off at her home. He pulled out a handgun, told me to drive and directed me into the loading dock of an industrial-area abandoned warehouse. He said he’d warned me to stay away and now he was going to kill me. I was too scared to say much of anything, but managed to keep him talking until he broke down in tears, jumped out of my car and ran off, leaving me to sit there to try to start breathing again.
Gun rights people would say I should have had a weapon to protect myself in that situation. If I’d had a gun, at that close range one of us most likely would have ended up dead. Probably it would have been me. As it was, we both lived to see another day. I can only imagine in the tiniest, most remote way what those first Aurora officers felt at the Henry Pratt warehouse when they raced into the factory, not knowing what may be waiting for them.
On that afternoon, I happened to be near the windows on the third floor of the Santori Library in downtown Aurora when I heard sirens and saw four squad cars racing south on Lake Street. The first thought that entered my mind was that someone got shot. It’s sad that was my first thought and sadder that it turned out to be true.
When I was in the army, I qualified as a weapons expert. That period in the military was the first and last time I ever fired any type of gun, or tossed a grenade. Death to other forms of life was never high on my to do list.
I’m going to close with a final word of gratitude and respect for the brave first responders and all those involved in the Henry Pratt horror. My heart and prayers go out to the wounded officers and family members who lost loved ones to a loser, who we’ll probably learn as more details emerge, never should have been allowed to have a gun in the first place. Seems we’ve heard this previously. Our city can now add its name to the growing list of communities affected by gun violence from mass shootings.
When will we ever learn?