DENVER (AP) – When Sandy Phillips saw the bloodbath in Paris unfold on her television screen, she knew instantly that hundreds of families would be getting phone calls like the one she got three years ago.
She has become painfully familiar with mass shootings since a gunman killed her daughter in a crowded suburban Denver movie theater, and she’s frustrated when pundits wonder if similar attacks on “soft targets” could happen in America.
“What ‘soft-target’ are you talking about? A school? Oh, gee, it’s already happened, several times. A movie theater? Oh, gee, it’s already happened,” Phillips said. “Who are we fooling? We’ve been living under terrorist attacks since Columbine. They’re just being done by our own people.”
In fact, mass shootings are increasingly frequent, and only a few dozen of the more than 215,000 people murdered in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were killed by Muslim extremists, despite fears that an attack similar to Paris could happen at U.S. stadiums, theaters or sidewalk cafes.
Tom Sullivan’s son Alex also died in the Colorado theater, where a deranged neuroscience student assembled an arsenal of weapons and attacked unsuspecting moviegoers watching a Batman film, killing 12 and wounding more than 70. He gets why James Holmes wasn’t called a terrorist, but he says the heartbreak is identical for families of the 89 people killed in the Bataclan concert hall last Friday.