Lupica: Colorado school shooting shows Newtown has changed nothing

So this time it happens again at a school in Colorado just a few minutes away from Columbine High School, and happens one day before the first anniversary of 26 dead at an elementary school, Sandy Hook Elementary, in Newtown, Conn.

This time an 18-year old walks into a local retail store in Colorado and buys himself a legal pump-action shotgun and a week later walks into Arapahoe High School and shoots a lovely young girl named Claire Davis in the head.

It isn’t 20 elementary school children gunned down in Connecticut this time. It is once again Colorado, where the gun nuts target you and run you out of political office if you even talk about more gun control, even in a state that feels like the capital of senseless shootings because of Columbine, because of Aurora.

Ed Andrieski/AP

Terrified students comfort each other Friday after a student was fatally shot at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo.

It is one high school student this time: Claire Davis, 17, who loves riding and loves horses and was living a wonderful life, one full of promise and possibilities, before Karl Pierson shot her on Friday because he had that big gun with him and she was the first in his way in the 80 seconds between when he walked through the doors of his school and finally did the world a favor and shot himself.

You always hear it isn’t the gun, don’t blame the gun, which is always like saying Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron could have hit all those home runs without a bat in their hands.

But Karl Pierson, there to settle a score with a debate team teacher if he got the chance, also had a machete with him at Arapahoe High on Friday, and a Molotov cocktail, almost one year exactly after Newtown.

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In this framegrab taken from a video by KCNC television news in Denver, students at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., gather at a running track on Friday after a shooting at the school. Two students were injured in the shooting incident before the suspected gunman apparently killed himself, the local sheriff said.

Pierson used his gun on Claire Davis because the gun always makes killing quick and easy, in this world where teenagers are allowed to buy pump-action shotguns, apparently in case they have to charge a machine gun nest before practicing with the debate team.

You want to tell any teenager, unhinged like Karl Pierson or not, that if he really needs a gun, join the Army and go shoot up Afghanistan.

EVAN SEMON/REUTERS

Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., was the scene of a shooting Friday when a student seeking to confront one of his teachers opened fire, wounding at least two classmates, one of them fatally, before killing himself, authorities said.

So while bells were rung in Newtown on Saturday to honor the dead of that town, while this kind of sound once again replaced the ringing of Christmas bells in Connecticut, Claire Davis was in a coma in Colorado, shot in cold blood the way she was shot for the crime of sitting in her school library.

It was a Friday at Arapahoe High the way it was a Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary, 12 days before Christmas this time in the country of guns, where nothing important has changed with gun control in America despite all the vigils and ceremonies and bell ringing and noble intentions; despite the pleas to Congress from parents of Sandy Hook victims, despite all the speeches President Obama has made about guns.

John Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado, was on “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, talking about Claire Davis being in a coma. Hickenlooper had already called the girl’s shooting “inexplicable.”

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Karl Pierson, 18, came armed to Arapahoe High School with the intention of targeting a teacher on Friday. He wound up killing another student, Claire Davis, 17, before turning the gun on himself.

Not in a country where it is as easy as it is to get a gun, legally or not. Karl Pierson didn’t get his shotgun from a gun-loving mother like Adam Lanza of Newtown did. He went to a store and got it himself. Not old enough to legally drink in the state of Colorado, but old enough and legal enough and protected enough by the Second Amendment to buy a shotgun and then use it to shoot a high school senior in the head.

The best part of this? The best part is that decent politicians were trying to do something about guns in Colorado. Some Democratic politicians in the state took the lead on smart, tough legislation this year, trying to expand background checks — which only idiots think is some threat to everything good and decent — and limit the size of ammunition magazines. It meant they were trying to be as smart and tough on guns as the state of New York is.

Maybe you know what happened. If you don’t, here’s what happened: Various knuckle-draggers from the National Rifle Association and the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners organized successful recalls of two state senators, both Democrats — John Morse and Angela Giron — who voted for the tougher laws.

Karl Pierson seen in an image posted on his Facebook page. He was able to legally buy a pump-action shotgun that he used to kill a fellow student at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colo., Friday.

Of course, two-thirds of the money spent on the recalls for Morse and Giron came from the National Rifle Association, an organization dedicated to putting as many guns, especially the fast-killing ones, in as many hands as possible in America.

“There was no time for the victim to run from the shooter,” the Arapahoe sheriff, Grayson Robinson said Saturday.

The victim or victims never do have enough time to run, the gun always wins, an assault rifle in Newtown, a pump-action shotgun at Arapahoe High School. One year after Newtown, the sound you heard wasn’t bells being rung in America, just another big gun being fired.

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Lupica: Colorado school shooting shows Newtown has changed nothing

The death of Arapahoe High School student Claire Davis, 17, who was shot in the head by a teen using a shotgun that he legally bought, is evidence that the gun control campaign has got nowhere in the year after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.