Rush hour commuters northbound on one of the area’s most heavily traveled corridors on Tuesday were greeted with a stark political message funded by one Boulder woman who has run out of patience with what she sees as empty words offered in the face of a public safety crisis.
In stark white letters on black background, the message points out that more Americans (1.4 million) have died in gun violence since 1970 than in all wars fought in U.S. history (1.3 million), and ends with the plea, “stop the thoughts and prayers.”
At the cost of about $3,000 for the first month, the grim note perched just south of the Boulder-Jefferson county line is sponsored by Lindasue Smollen, a divorce and criminal defense lawyer who lives in Boulder and is paying for it out of her own pocket.
The billboard is based on data gleaned from a piece by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, which was subsequently verified by PunditFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute.
“We’ve become absolutely numb to mass shootings. It is the new normal,” Smollen said Tuesday, the first full day the message was in place. “We no longer stop and be horrified on mass shootings. And after Las Vegas, I just simply could not believe that nothing, nothing, was done.”
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