On a Recent Trip to Colorado, I Had to Spend A Lot of Time in Supermarkets
Maybe it's my imagination running away with me, but I was never relaxed and always planning an escape route
Since early November, for nearly 10 days, I spent a lot of time in the Colorado supermarket chain King Soopers for a project on which I was working. “Scoopers,” as I started to call it fondly after a few days, is no different than most major U.S. supermarket chains.
It has the same products, the same deli section, the same frozen foods section, and the same self-check-out terminals.
The slow-moving shoppers who clutter up the aisles during the afternoons are replaced by the more harried, fast-moving after-work crowd who absolutely hate being in the store but need something quick and easy for dinner. There is one thing about King Soopers that separates it from most chains in America, but sadly, not as many as we would like to think: It was the place of a mass shooting in 2021 in Boulder: 10 citizens were slaughtered.
The victims of the Boulder shooting would have been of the “slow-moving type.” The retirees and the random ones like me. The reaction time for many of the shoppers would have been limited, but some, on the day of the shooting, did what I was constantly planning while wandering around the aisles looking for things last week: They raced for their lives out of the back of the store.
It is a sad statement in our society that grocery shopping has become dangerous. I admit that overall, it is still more likely that you will get struck by lightning than killed in a mass shooting — this is the justification the gun-obsessed use when speaking against gun control.
Only one shooting in our database prior to 2019 took place at a supermarket. In 1999, a 23-year-old white male with a history of criminal violence killed four people at a supermarket in Las Vegas. However, there has been a raft of mass shootings at American supermarkets since (More Mass Shootings Are Happing at Grocery Stores).
Since then, there have been four major ones, including the King Soopers’s shooting in Boulder. I can say that it freaks me out when I enter the public space in our country. I don’t restrict my movements, but I do look at people differently — never suspiciously, though. Given our nation’s growing penchant for our shoot-first-and-deal-with-the-consequences-later approach to life, I don’t want to set anyone off.
The gun-obsessed, or gun-perverse, have so many stupid, irrelevant statistics on their side. As I wrote above, it is more likely you will die from a lightning strike or a fall from a ladder than as a victim in a mass shooting. However, it’s still grotesque, if not a clear sign of our nation’s plunge into chaos, that civilized and socialized humans enter into peaceful, everyday settings like grocery stores, churches, schools, and so many other places where we congregate — where we live — and they brutally end lives with weapons of war.
In “Scoopers,” I never lingered up at the front of the store. I was wary of loud, clapping sounds. Once, I heard what I imagined gunfire would sound like: a dull thud from a few aisles over. A voice then followed: “Oh, Jesus!” I listened intently for a follow-up thud, but nothing came. Then, I heard that owner that voice laugh and figured that something had fallen. The survivors of mass shootings always talk about the initial sound. “It sounded like something fell from high up. It sounded like firecrackers. It sounded like a thunderclap.”
My greatest worry was when I was up front at the check-out. I wasn’t panicking or getting cold sweats, but I admit that my pace was a bit more hurried. Exiting, I did my best to assess each person exiting their vehicles and then did my best to scamper as quickly as I could “out of harm’s way.”
The gun-perverse will call this ridiculous and even sad. “What a dummy he is, ‘scampering out of harm’s way!”
Maybe I am overreacting. Nonetheless, I would rather overreact than end up with my brains strewn across the Honey Crisp apples in the produce section.
I am not in Colorado anymore and have yet to go to a supermarket in Portugal. I know my “American concerns for safety” will last a while. It makes me wonder: Is any of this normal?
Of course, it’s not. The 2nd Amendment is an anachronism, and the intellectually weak Americans who find some bizarre comfort in it are the true dummies in our society.
Normal? Depends on the society and overall risk situation. I bet you are not the only one with such thoughts. In the Us I understand it. After all there is training in schools on what to when school shootings happens. But maybe they should train in how to avoid being struck by Lightning? The point is that the whole society reacts to something like mass shootings. This seems like an understandable, while not funny way.