This is really an issue of demand. They wouldn’t do it if people weren’t eating it up.
It’s awful what happened. I was going to go see the movie this weekend but I didn’t want to be distracted with thoughts of those poor people (I have a fear of mass murder in movie theaters that precedes this event.)
That said, this shit has been happening for a long time. It’s probably going to keep happening. The odds of it happening to any random individual are statistically very small. The guy’s a fucking nutjob. It’s tragic. I don’t think there is anything beyond that we can say.
That’s the problem Olive, people are accepting this as a part of life. I don’t know all the facts regarding where this nutcase got teargas grenades, body armor, 3000 rounds of ammunition and 100 round magazines for an AR-15 assault rifle, but where ever he did, there should have been an alarm sounded in someone’s head. I may be premature at claiming an internet source here, but it seems the next logical step is examining the need of private citizens to possess this sort of combat gear.
Not only did I LOL, but I did so loudly. I freakin’ cackled.
Holy fuck. Stop it, you guys… I can’t…
Anyway, up until now I was kind of glad we didn’t have a Batman shooter Pit thread because there are already threads about it, and it’s kind of pointless to start a new one saying “Killing is bad,” but here we are. I’m going to use this as an opportunity to repost this reposting of Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon because it makes me oh so happy, and is perfect.
I realize its early, but did this guy give out any warning signals? As I recall, Klebold and his pal gave out plenty of warning signs-which were ignored.
We could look at it that way. Or we could look at what it is about society that is allowing these people to get created in the first place. My knee-jerk reaction wasn’t ''omg guns!!!" but “omg, when are people going to learn that mentally ill people need supportive services?”
I’m assuming he’s mentally ill. I don’t actually know.
I honestly, totally and truly do not give a shit about gun control. But I feel like a lot of gun-control fantatics are focusing on the symptoms of the problem rather than the actual problem itself.
We need an Adam West press conference, where he points out that if they’d made the Batman Trilogy the world’s been clamoring for, with the BIFFs and the POWs and Aunt Harriet, we would never have this trouble.
I mean, c’mon, a kid dressed up as the Frank Gorshin Riddler? Now, it might be hard to get him to sit still for 3 hours, but his pal in the Burgess Meredith Penguin costume could poke him with his Tranquilizer Umbrella.
Come to think of it, if I’d been in that theater, I’d’ve been shielding my kids with my body… but also annoying them by singing “Na na na na na na na/ Na na na na na na na na/ Bat…Man…”
I heard from someone (reliability factor -1, I know) that his mother was not surprised. If you commit mass murder and mom is nonplussed, that’s gotta be a sign. If what I heard is incorrect, my apologies to the killer dude.
I got a whiff of that, too. It’s too soon to make assumptions about what the guy was thinking, but I’m guessing it’s a case of early adult onset of schizophrenia or something like that.
Read the links given earlier. It’s BS. It is just in the standard script (see Onion story) that the media tries to whip up an “it’s the parents’ fault; they should have known” angle.
Society doesn’t ‘allow’ these people to be created nor does it have anything to do with creating them. All societies will produce aberrant personalities. These monsters create themselves, it’s all their own work. What we really need is a way of identifying such personalities before they strike and that’s a hell of a tall order.
I’m Canadian and am all for gun control. This was the act of one sick individual, just like Anders Behring Breivik and Noway has some of the toughest gun laws in the world, apparently.
You wrongfully assumed I was on the 2nd amendment/NRA side of the fence; I’m not, but I don’t believe this had anything to do with gun control laws.
I don’t want him to be mentally ill or neurologically atypical or any other way of being “disordered”. I guess I want him to be a normal guy who just happens to be evil.
To me, the deal is that it takes the easy availability of advanced weaponry for the problems of a mentally ill person to become the problems of a whole bunch of other people too.
Besides, you don’t think we libruls want a more mentally healthy society? Sheesh. We’re working for a country with less economic stress on common people, with universal health care, yada yada yada, but it’s taking longer than we hoped. But I’d also like to see it be a little harder for a single nutcase to shoot 70 of his fellow human beings, given the unfortunate persistence of mass shootings.
In another forum, earlier today, another commenter did the old ‘shouldn’t you instead be doing something about the greater number of people killed by cars each year’ bit. From Unsafe At Any Speed to air bags and beyond, we have in fact been working on that. Hell, we fight for mass transit and high-speed intercity rail which would get more people off the road and into a much safer means of travel, and we run into opposition all the way. It’s not like we’re not fighting for these things already.
Besides, if we were to only fight against the most serious threat in the world, we’d be doing climate change and nothing else; screw unemployment or the economy or health care or anything else. That would be pretty ridiculous.
So I think it’s right and fitting to address this problem we have, where one person can shoot 70 people in just a few minutes. If there’s something we can do to make that a lot more difficult if not impossible without revoking the right to possess firearms, we should do it. And it’s hardly a dereliction of some other, greater, duty to do so.
I’m hearing now that the baby wasn’t injured at all, but rather taken to the hospital just to be checked out to be sure and then was released. Parents taking babies to the movies could very well be what made this guy snap though. But I hear the US now has separate family rooms in some theaters, so maybe it wasn’t so bad.
Unfortunately mentally ill people is what we see in almost all the recent cases of mass murder, the sad reality is that it is very likely that there was almost nothing done to check his mental condition even after many red flags had appeared in his past or if they had, very little was done in the way of treatment as usually it is something that it is hard to get in the USA.
BTW the much opposed ACA does help a bit towards a better way to deal with the inadequate system that we have now.
Of course that is only half of what it needs to be done IMHO, the other half deals with improving the reporting and identification of people with problems that will get limited access to weapons; however, the last time I proposed that I got several gun rights people that opposed even that sensible idea.