Surely you jest.
It’s to be expected; like Mexico, they suffer from being next to America and its ocean of guns. Guns are like a plague we spread to our neighbors. In Europe most people including the criminals don’t have (or want) guns in the first place.
The shooter apparently gassed the theater with tear gas. I wondered if tear gas was really commercially available. Turns out it is. What the hell, who needs to buy a tear gas grenade?
Please tell me you need some kind of permit to buy this stuff over the internet.
Then why has crime been going down in the US for decades despite the fact that gun laws have increasingly been liberalized? Not to mention by this logic Canada should be also suffering from a “plague” of guns.
I have tried, but I really can’t conceive of a more asinine response than this.
For some reason, I always keep forgetting about the vast, vast amount of time you spent living in Europe; Care to remind me please?
I haven’t gone to the movies in years, but if I did I wouldn’t be especially concerned about going there. This doesn’t appear to be something like a gang related shooting, where you can reasonably worry about something similar happening in the area again. This appears to be just another lone loony, and they can show up anywhere.
Because guns don’t usually cause crime, they just make it worse when it happens.
Well, “black rage” can apparently be blamed for mass killings in some cases.
Every time I hear about this kind of incident, it makes me think about how if more people would take mental illness seriously (instead of having prejudices that people should be able to snap out of it or something) we might be able to prevent some of these tragedies. I think that focusing on mental health would be more productive than trying to blame it on violence in the media or the opposite political party.
The shooter was a pre-med or med student. Back in university, I remember we read one study of medical-school students that showed the rate of mental illness increased progressively with each year. Fourth-year students as a whole were much crazier than the first-year students. The researcher could not decide whether medical school drove you crazy or if the sane ones tended to drop out as they went along.
I dislike agreeing with you, but that is an interesting point. 
Minor nit pick, but it was AMC that issued the statement that there will be no more masks or mock weapons in it’s theaters.
The shooting took place at Century Theaters, which is owned by Cinemark. They have not issued any statements of any kind. Of course I’m sure that they have their hands full, but it’s wierd that they have said nothing so far.
I vaguely recall that med students mistakenly believe they have the diseases they study, too.
Whoa. Did he actually say, “I’m the joker”. It’s a shame, CNN is starting to slip when it comes to credibility to me. Everyone is so eager to get the story first, I don’t really trust the stories anymore until a bit of time passes. And, by the way, the Joker doesn’t have red hair, does he? I mean, maybe he does in certain comic books or something?
No, the Joker has always had green hair. So either something’s being miss-reported, or the shooter isn’t much of a Batman fan after all.
The news is saying his apartment was diabolically booby-trapped and that he told police this. I’m wondering why he would go to all the trouble of diabolically booby-trapping the place and then announcing it. Hoping to get a lenient sentence for cooperation?
It’s being reported that he told police was the Joker, yes. I’m not totally confident he said it, but it sounds like he did. I think Ray Kelly (NYPD Police Commissioner) went on the record saying that. And yes, the Joker has green hair and not red and for that matter he’s not in the new movie. The guy didn’t have to be a fan. Maybe he just got fixated on Batman because of all the hype surrounding the Dark Knight Rises premiere.
Thank you for clearing that up. The AMC policy doesn’t bother me, but the Cinemark one is stupid. I’ll have to keep that straight and avoid their theaters.
Or maybe he was a huge fan of the Heath Ledger film, identified with the joker, saw himself as some kind of anarchist and decided the Dark Knight Rises would be the best place to make his splash. Or, maybe I am pulling all of this out of my big black ass. Because I also am not convinced he even said it. And if he did, that still doesn’t mean my wild speculations mean a thing.
I hate this “need” standard when it comes to weapons. People don’t “need” booze, junk food, cigarettes, pornography, air conditioning, or a whole host of other things in society. The question on banning something in a free society is not whether that something is an absolute necessity, but the reasons for banning it, and if those reasons overcome a free person being able to have it.
Maybe tear gas meets that threshold, but the whole “who needs X” is the wrong starting point.
The reports he was a med student weren’t accurate. He was apparently getting a PhD in Neuroscience actually.
From my experience, I would say that yes med school does tend to make people depressed, but I don’t think it makes people homicidal.