For Release: Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Washington, DC — Following the mass shooting yesterday at a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colorado that reportedly involved an AR-15 assault rifle and left 10 dead, including a Boulder police officer, Violence Policy Center (VPC) Executive Director Josh Sugarmann issued the following statement:
“Once again, a military-bred assault rifle was used for the exact purpose for which it was designed: to kill and injure as many people as quickly and efficiently as possible. This latest mass shooting in a public space is the direct result of the gun industry’s embrace of militarization and heightened lethality in its products. As a result of the gun industry’s hyper-marketing of these military-bred weapons, they are consistently used by civilians to carry out unspeakable atrocities. Our nation is being held hostage by the gun industry, and until the industry is held fully accountable for the direct role it plays in these massacres, communities across the nation will continue to live in fear of the next horrendous attack.”
According to a VPC analysis released earlier this year, one in five law enforcement officers slain in the line of duty from 2016 to 2018 were killed with assault weapons. For additional information on assault weapons and the threat they pose to public safety and law enforcement, please see https://vpc.org/regulating-the-gun-industry/assault-weapons/. For a listing of examples of mass shootings in the United States since 1980 involving large-capacity ammunition magazines, please see https://vpc.org/fact_sht/VPCshootinglist.pdf.
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The Violence Policy Center is a national educational organization working to stop gun death and injury. Follow the VPC on Twitter and Facebook.
