![]() Hickenlooper began his tenure as a sensible centrist. In April, Kansas passed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, while in Democratically controlled New York, Governor Cuomo unveiled a bill to guarantee in state law the protections provided by Roe v. Two weeks before Hickenlooper signed his gun laws, the Republican governor of South Dakota signed legislation allowing school employees to carry firearms. Activists, frustrated by the partisan gridlock in Washington, are pushing their agendas in state capitals that are dominated by a single party and thus can swiftly move legislation. According to the National Journal, an unprecedented thirty-six states are controlled by one party or the other. Obama won the state in 20, and the state House and Senate are both controlled by Democrats.Ĭolorado is part of a national trend: red states are becoming redder and blue states are becoming bluer. But an influx of young liberals drawn to the mountains, retirees from the Northeast, and a growing Latino population-now twenty per cent of the electorate-has made Colorado increasingly Democratic. Colorado voted for Republican Presidential candidates in three consecutive elections, from 1996 to 2004. Hickenlooper, who campaigned as a governor who would appeal to all voters, has had some trouble keeping up with the political changes in his own state. “We’ve asked again and again for evidence of someone defending their home who needed more than fifteen rounds in a clip for a magazine. and the advocates for no regulation really aren’t telling completely the truth when they say this is the beginning of losing your weapons,” Hickenlooper said, referring to the ban on large magazines, the most controversial law that he signed. “But there’s so many of these shootings now that it seems like it’s always the wrong time.” “We weren’t in the right place to talk about it right after that shooting,” Hickenlooper told me recently, during an interview in his office, while his dog, Skye, an Akita-bulldog-Chow Chow mix, gnawed on a bone nearby. called Hickenlooper a “fanatic,” who was “only interested in pleasing Mayor Bloomberg.” Some Colorado conservatives have talked about initiating a recall. Senate, Hickenlooper had signed three new gun-control laws that were among the toughest in the country, including a ban on high-capacity magazines like the one that Holmes used. By March of this year, a few weeks before President Obama’s firearms legislation was derailed in the U.S. “We’re in an information age, where there’s access to all kinds of information, and he was diabolical.” ![]() “If he couldn’t have gotten access to the guns, what kind of bomb would he have manufactured?” he responded to David Gregory, during an interview on “Meet the Press,” two days after the shooting. After the massacre, when asked if he supported new restrictions on firearms Hickenlooper said that it was too soon to discuss the issue. He was not convinced that any law could have stopped the killer. ![]() Hickenlooper, a Democrat, had grown up around guns, and his relationship with the National Rifle Association was cordial. He used three guns, including a semi-automatic rifle with a hundred-round magazine, which jammed before he could empty it. The alleged murderer, twenty-five-year-old James Eagan Holmes, was captured outside the theatre minutes after the police arrived on the scene. The scale and the madness of it-shooting seventy people.” “I mean, even the most hardened professionals were in shock. “They were still in the process of removing the people who were dead,” Hickenlooper told me. Bodies and popcorn and empty ammunition shells were strewn about the floor pocketbooks and other personal belongings had been left behind in the rush to escape. A light on top of a handheld camera illuminated a scene of carnage. At 12:30 A.M., at the Century 16 movie theatre in Aurora, a young man wearing black body armor walked into the local première of “The Dark Knight Rises” and sprayed the audience with bullets twelve people were killed and fifty-eight were injured.Īt eight-thirty the following morning, Hickenlooper was ushered into a crime-scene trailer in the theatre’s parking lot, where officers showed him a video that they had taken inside shortly after the incident. On July 20, 2012, Governor John Hickenlooper, of Colorado, was attending a friend’s seventieth-birthday party in Colorado Springs when he learned about a shooting in a suburb east of Denver. ![]()
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