A family outside Gateway High School after a gunman opened fire in Aurora, Colo., on July 20, 2012.
Two mass shootings of unarmed civilians two weeks apart rocked America’s summer, raising new anxieties of gun violence. The first took place July 20 in a movie theater in the Colorado town of Aurora: a gunman bearing multiple firearms, grenades and combat armor burst into a screening of The Dark Knight Rises and opened fire, killing 12 people and injuring dozens more. Then, on August 5 in the Wisconsin hamlet of Oak Creek, a shooter ran into a Sikh temple and killed six people before exchanging fire with a police officer and shooting himself in the head. Both grisly incidents crowded national frontpages, but the larger, difficult narratives surrounding the attacks — the ability of the 24-year-old Aurora suspect to allegedly acquire such firepower so easily; the racism of the Oak Creek gunman — faded from the national conversation in an election year.