Kyle Smith:
Here we go again. In our outrage over the Aurora massacre, we slip back into our habit of trying to make sense of the senseless, to trace a chain of causation back to its source, and eliminate that source so it will never happen again.
This fallacy reached its peak of absurdity after the Tucson massacre, when we as a society decided to stop using violent metaphors for about 10 minutes, because we all know Jared Lee Loughner wouldn’t have gone wacko if people didn’t say things like “let’s target” a congressional district. Then we saw Loughner’s loony picture, and all discussion about whether he was nuts ended.
Unfortunately, Columbine/Virginia Tech/Fort Hood/Tucson/Aurora will happen again, and again, because not every problem has a solution.
Immediately after the movie theater shooting early Friday morning, the national knee-jerk took over Twitter as we searched for someone to blame besides the one person responsible. Maybe it was the NRA. Maybe it was a culture of violence. Maybe it was movies like “The Dark Knight” that make villains seem cool.
The official Twitter feed of the National Rifle Association began the day, hours after the shooting, with a sunny, “Good morning, shooters. Happy Friday! Weekend plans?” The reaction proved only that people who hate the NRA continue to hate the NRA. But not checking the news before tweeting, or setting up an innocuous tweet to run in advance, is nothing to be outraged about.
Still, wouldn’t gun control have saved all those lives? Here we get back to Charlton Heston vs. Michael Moore. Heston told Moore, in “Bowling for Columbine,” that he backed guns because it was his Second Amendment right. Moore did everything to Heston but rebut that point.
It’s fair to debate whether the Second Amendment is a good idea, but doing so is purely an exercise in abstraction. There’s no debating that it’s there, and it’s there to stay. When 2004 John Kerry feels obliged to dress up like Elmer Fudd and go wabbit hunting for the cameras and 2008 Barack Obama feels obliged to tell Virginians, “I will not take your rifle away. I will not take your handgun away . . . it just ain’t true,” the possibility of repealing the Second Amendment stands at zero. You can’t blame the NRA for being fans of the Second Amendment any more than you can blame reporters for being fans of the First.
If Colorado wants to tighten its gun laws, the Second Amendment phrase “well-regulated” allows them to do so, but if it continues to be a gun-happy state, it must think the benefits of its laws outweigh the costs. If you don’t like loose gun laws, move to (or stay in) New York or Massachusetts.
What about Hollywood? After Ray Kelly said the gunman at the screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” claimed to be the Joker and had painted his hair red, it seemed possible that the killer is the kind of guy who watched Michael Caine’s “some men just want to watch the world burn” speech in “The Dark Knight” and thought: “My idol!”
Actually, James Holmes’ gun-range application drew red flag from the club’s owner whose calls to Holmes’ apartment reached a “creepy, weird” Batman-inspired voicemail message.
“I told my staff, here’s the name — James Holmes — this is the person. If he shows up come get me. I need to talk to him before anything else,” Glenn Rotkovich, of the Lead Valley Range, in Byers, Colo., told FoxNews.com. “I said, I’m not sure about this guy.’
Rotkovich says he always needs to get to know the applicant a little before considering people for membership at his family’s range, and Holmes’s application was business-like and devoid of any personal information. Rotkovich planned to vet Holmes in person before he would be allowed to step on the range and pick up a weapon, let alone become a member.
He called Holmes to follow up, he said, and to make sure he could attend the mandatory pre-membership orientation and safety rules training. That’s when he heard the strange message, which when Rotkovich tried to imitate it, sounded like a mix of moaning in the background and movie-character-like exaggerated squeals and laughter.
“In hindsight, looking back — and if I’d seen the movies — maybe I’d say it was like the Joker — I would have gotten the Joker out of it,” he said. “It was like somebody was trying to be as weird as possible,” he said.
After calling back two more times several days apart and getting that same message, he alerted his staff.
Rotkovich never heard from Holmes again.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/07/22/massacre-suspect-james-holmes-gun-range-application-drew-red-flag-for-owner/#ixzz21Nh0olbe
Mass murderers like Holmes are RARE, when you take into consideration- what? 240 million guns out there? And the size of the U.S. population? The numbers of shopping malls, theaters, and public venues where acts like this don’t occur on a regular basis? This is news in large part BECAUSE it is such a rarity. This should not be grounds for an overreaction response (aside from being on the alert for copy-cat mentally-deranged nutjobs seeking infamy and notoriety from an all-too willing media and public willing to grant them the wish for being made famous) through more gun laws (how would restricting guns from being allowed into a theater prevent a Holmes from bringing his toys into the theater? Well….it didn’t).
For weeks to come, after the initial kneejerk reactions from the left how this was the fault of the TEA Party, radical talk by rightwingers, yada, yada, we will then be subjected to countless talking heads telling us that only a truely insane person could have committed this henious act and how we, as a nation/society have failed the mentally ill. You see, it has to be the fault of society, otherwise how does one make sense of a senseless act?
We will be referenced to study after study dealing with the mind of the criminally insane who commit mass murder. Those studies started on August 2, 1966, and they are not going to stop now. And after millions of $$ are spent, we will know as little about the mind of a mass murderer, and how to avoid the next slaughter, as we do today.
But there has to reason that someone would have such little value for human life, right? No sane person would support the destruction of human life on such a scale, right? Can we then assume that all those on the left who have supported the willful destruction of human life on such a massive scale as we have seen through abortion are also insane? Careful, lefties, you are entering a slipery slope there.
And what is insane? Are we, as a society, to demand that everyone who seems a little bit quirky to what is considered the norm, be declared “insane?” Where do we draw the line between someone who likes to attend StarTrek conventions and dress up like Spock and who are, for all intent and purposes, functional adults and the insane? Today I read an opinion that called for more intervention into the mentally ill by the states. Constitutional rights be damned. Is that where this is leading? Seems history has already provided us with examples of that policy.
Let’s face it; there is no science that can tell us, honesty, why someone would do what the Aurora shooter did any more than science can tell us why a man might get up on a Saturday morning and decide to go fishing. The human brain is a complex organ, and there is more that is not known than there is known about it. We need to just accept that there is actually evil in this world, and no one can truely know the cause of why a functional adult choose evil over good.
@retire05:
But there are two such sciences: anthropology and theology.
This man’s behavior is shocking but it is not inexplicable. Augustine would understand him well.
The meticulous four months of planning of his crime displays someone of sane mind, as does the careful booby-trapping of his apartment. His modus operandus was to try to emulate the character and practicies of the “Joker”. I expect he applied himself with same studious consideration of character a method actor would take on, in order to “psyc” himself up into taking on the calculated mantel of the “Joker” personality in committing these crimes (including considering the booby trapping of ‘his lair’ with bombs which is a “Joker” trademark. No, I would say this killer was quite sane, but intends to implement an insanity defense as a sociopath with dissociative identity disorder and delusions of grandeur. His web-history and the contents of his hard drive will no doubt aid in proving his guilt and sanity.
The key in successfully using the insanity defense is in proving that the person has an inability to know that crimes the perpetrator creates are right or wrong, or an inability to realize what they have done. Being a psychopath will not generally be accepted as sufficient to pass the M’Naghton rule. It is estimated that 1-4% of people are sociopaths, but most are socially adapt psychopaths who know full well the difference between right and wrong and that if they cross the line they will be prosecuted. Just because a person is a sociopath it does not make them crazy.
@Ditto:
And that Mr. Ditto is a worthy contribution to our consideration. Thank you. Violence and homicide may shock us but they are rarely truly irrational or senseless. Violence and homicide are hard wired into our species.
Is the right-wing proud of these statistics? Or are they just to resolved the opinion the nothing can be done?
I want to maintain my gun rights—I own four or five pistols and don’t want anyone taking the away from me. But that’s little consolation to friends and relatives who are devastated by the death of their loved ones to gun violence. How about some new answers to this problem?
Found the article lib#2 cited but did not link
U.S. Leads Richest Nations In Gun Deaths
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.guncite.com/cnngunde.html&sa=U&ei=nXENUKaRA9P_qAGOre3TCg&ved=0CBEQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNFev2d5bUudGDs7wGx9DHIXimRVfA
It’s from 1994
@Liberal1 (objectivity):
Tsk, tsk, tsk. Very disingenuous of you Liberal1 to cherry pick the one part of the overall study which is noted as meant to cloud the issue. Let’s see more from the same study:
Under that portion of the study is “International Violent Death Rate Table” which provides more complete statistics that shows that the US is much farther down the list with a violent death rate of 18.57 with only 3.72 of that being homicides by firearms, 7.35 of that being suicide by handgun. With 39.0% of households with guns, the ratio of violent deaths is much lower than in many other nations. You will note that what is not included in the study, is separation of the violent death by firearm statistics into the sub categories of: Criminal Homicide, Justifiable Self-Defense Homicide, Justified Law Enforcement Action Homicide, and Accidental Homicide. So we can see that statistics can be very misleading when significant details are left out.
Or maybe you can. If you act.
Psychiatrist Called Threat Team About Aurora Shooting Suspect James Holmes