14 dead and 50 injured in mass shooting in Colorado.

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I think, all things considered, I feel safer placing my life in the hands of psycho killers than politicians.

3 words: no guns allowed. The law abiding people obliged and the cops got there in time for the attacker's guns to run out of ammo or jam, and surrender.

And of course lots of people here are going to spout off what they heard clueless reporters say about guns.

I've learned a lot about guns from the media too- like once I saw a hunter on tv put a shotgun down a rabbit hole, and when he pulled the trigger the gun exploded in his face because the rabbit tied a knot in the barrel!

Hope he doesn't get off on mental illness. Somehow I find it extremely hard to believe that someone so delusional could so methodically plan this out. It doesn't sound like a psychotic killing (using psychotic in the technical sense).

I guess brain tumor is a possibility, since it can cause personality change.

Other than that, maybe just a sadist.

Already CNN is harping on mental health aspects and forcing people to take seriously debilitating psychotropic drugs over issues like social isolation when clearly there is evidence James Holmes was, in fact, not a loner, but reaching out to people on websites like AdultFriendFinders and might have had friends through that (and maybe others?) website. You don't hear the media saying send people who post ads on that website to the psychiatrist and put them all on Thorazine, do you? Yet, they focus on people who do not have a lot of friends and pathologize them.

Thing that irritates me most about the media is, as soon as evidence starts appearing that this guy might not be alone, they start harping on loners and social isolation to compensate. If this guy was posting ads on AdultFriendFinders then he must have met up with people in Colorado. He might have even had one or more accompany him to the premier of the Dark Knight. How do they know he did not? It could have been more than one person who planned this. I guess they can use footage from the security cameras at the movies to be sure.

Last edited by ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo on 21 Jul 2012, 11:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

Strangely I'm off to watch the new Batman... might risk not having a bulletproof vest and a gas mask.
In all seriousness though... it seems he may have been influenced by a certain character that killed a few people in a sex cinema... which is in a Batman book or comic, something like that.
It's a shame about the victims having to go through what they did.
Also, he seemed to blend in as it looked like a costume.

See there is a reason I don't watch the news.

Yeah, let's take this tragedy as an opportunity to jump to conclusions about guns and crime based on rare occurrences like this and make condescending generalizations about pro-gun folks. What a great display of integrity and character.

And for the record, I'm not even gonna get started on whether or not concealed carriers would've stopped this guy. There's really no telling how people would react to such a traumatizing situation like this. He had the element of surprise to his advantage plus the mental preparation to handle the shock of this type of violence, so I personally think people would've died either way.

Also, the media ignores the fact the guy might only appear alone in hindsight because after someone commits a crime like this, anyone who currently knows him goes to great lengths to create distance between themselves and the suspect because they do not want to be implicated in any of the crimes. Suddenly the guy with a close, circle of friends is completely alone and therefore a loner because his friends abandon him after he commits the crime. It's pure logic. Who wants to stick by the mass shooter? No one. So he MUST have been a loner the whole time.

I think that there are something deeply wrong with this "thing", I do not want to call him an animal as his conduct is worse than anything I have seen or heard of an animal doing. I do not want to call him a man, as real men do not shoot up a cinema full of innocent people. This thing might have posed as a man but was not in my eyes a "man".

I think it is important to look further than just the question of "should private citizens be allowed to own or carry a gun", to my mind the fact that he managed to open an emergency door and go to his car to collect his guns and come back is a rather important detail.

There maybe a need at cinemas to improve security, if someone opens a emergency door for example an alarm should ring and be investigated by a member of staff rather than just ignored so that creeps and gunmen can sneak in and out of the cinema.

The private ownership of things like CS gas canisters which explode does seem to me something which I can not think of as something a reasonable man or woman needs to have. I can understand someone having a can of mace or CS spray for dealing with muggers but things like stun grenades I can not see as a reasonable thing for the general public to own.

I'm in numbed shock and I keep obsessing on my nephew who is in youth camp because he brought two pipe bombs to school. I'm in pain because the family is trying to keep it a secret--even from everyone in the family! It's yet another one of those things no one is supposed to talk about.

Since I can't contact him or talk about it, I can only hope that he is getting some help--help that might divert him from the kind of path the shooter took.

My nephew is a young teen and he is bullied in and out of school. His mother was like the octomom, just having baby after baby but so much on drugs (as was his father) that my nephew and his oldest sister were taken care of by relatives. Subsequent babies were adopted by family members. There is so much secrecy in the family that I can't remember if we're supposed to talk about the sibling connections at all, much less to the kids themselves.

My nephew also may have been molested as a toddler when the octomom still had custody. His father got arrested for being a drug addict who stole stuff to feed his meth habit, so he was in and out of the picture. My nephew started stuttering around age four. I've been thinking about his character traits and I'm pretty convinced that he is an Aspie.

All this has been going through my head nonstop since I heard the news yesterday.

I'm so sorry for the victims, their family and friends, and yes, for the shooter and his family as well. My heart bleeds not just for everyone concerned, but for all of us.

He'll end up having Asperger's (pretty much all of them do).

Or how about saying to hell with the question altogether since it isn't the time and place to be classless and smug about tragic incidents like these? It serves no other purpose than shameless self-promotion of ideological values. Not that you're being classless and smug yourself, but these type of topics have their mouths watering.

Ask anyone what the cause of something as complex and multifaceted as crime is, and it'll be whatever they have an axe to grind with. Ask a feminist, and it's patriarchy. Ask someone who hates video games, and it's GTA. Ask a liberal, and it's oppression of minorities and lack of gun control. Ask a conservative, and it's the decline of morality and family structure/values. And so on and so on. Bottom line is, people are so arrogant and willfully ignorant that anything that is complex and multifaceted boils down to simplistic BS and it always seems to be the right time and place for them to ride on a high horse and soapbox.

PS: Yeah, I know someone's just itching to point out the irony of saying people take complex and multifaceted things while making sweeping generalizations about liberals, conservatives, video game haters, and feminists. These generalizations are strictly for the sake of illustrating a point so I didn't think it was necessarily to bog you all down with irrelevant details.

Last edited by AceOfSpades on 21 Jul 2012, 12:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Why is it taboo to examine issues when crimes like this occur? If people want to ban certain guns or drums in the state of Colorado because of this tragedy, they have my blessing and people who think they should be banned have the right to voice their opinion. Just as people who don't think they should be banned do.

Uh, would be able to tell exactly where the shots were coming from in a dark smoky room? It's not easy to aim and shoot someone you can't see clearly. The lights were dimmed and the movie was still playing, so the people in the seats would be illuminated by the light coming from the screen as soon as they stood up. They were sitting ducks. The shooter was standing at the front of the theater, near the outside exit door, out of the light. The bravado of gun nuts is annoying.