As many as 10 dead in shooting at Batman premiere in Denver: reports

[Peach]

I was referring to the posts here and elsewhere claiming the killings were a set up to "take our guns" away, but as it upset you so much, I shall amend;"FAR RIGHT EXTREMISTS, LIKE AL QAEDA, that despise the US". The killer's "kind" is American, no other conclusion to be drawn, other than his disregard for human life. Ariux posted something interesting, about the the media saturation we all live through. I see neither party as totally corrupt nor either party wishing the ruination of the US.

And for about the tenth time, this is less a gun crime than a HATE crime, why the killer hated so much is unknown.

 

[chopstiks]

America has 10 times the population of Australia, you dolt.

So what! Lord have mercy on these types of defensive arguments.
America has two times the population of Japan but 1000% more gun deaths.
So, by your reasoning... who's the biased dolt now.

Since Japan has the most restrictive of gun laws there should be 0 deaths by firearm but they had 47 last year

Why not bring Washington DC into it too while you're at it? Those stats should fit well in arguing your desired end result.

 

[chopstiks]

This isn't a gun control issue. It is a crazy person control issue.

You say that as if it meant something to an anti gun person. Anti gun people do not need much to make anything a gun issue. A tragedy like this is equivalent to a cherry on top of a sundae.

True. Gun control people are like race control people. They have only one answer to everything.

The people who want gun control are the same people that created the environment for this kind of insanity to thrive. Just listen to the excuses they are making now. It's the fault of the guns, it's the fault of the movies, it's the fault of unemployment, he didn't have a girlfriend, he had a tough time in school. He had to take a low paying job at McDonalds. One after the other, not one single person addresses the sole and only issue that caused this tragedy. James Holmes believes himself to be the Joker, out of Batman comic book.

Anti-gun people would say the same for the pro-gun types.
You have an answer for everything, to deflect blame, using super smug, hypothesis and political venom. Which is all part of the gun culture.
Nobody in civilian America NEEDS an AR-15.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

So what! Lord have mercy on these types of defensive arguments.
America has two times the population of Japan but 1000% more gun deaths.
So, by your reasoning... who's the biased dolt now.

Since Japan has the most restrictive of gun laws there should be 0 deaths by firearm but they had 47 last year

Why not bring Washington DC into it too while you're at it? Those stats should fit well in arguing your desired end result.

What? D.C. had total gun ban with high murder rate?

 

[bigrebnc1775]

You say that as if it meant something to an anti gun person. Anti gun people do not need much to make anything a gun issue. A tragedy like this is equivalent to a cherry on top of a sundae.

True. Gun control people are like race control people. They have only one answer to everything.

The people who want gun control are the same people that created the environment for this kind of insanity to thrive. Just listen to the excuses they are making now. It's the fault of the guns, it's the fault of the movies, it's the fault of unemployment, he didn't have a girlfriend, he had a tough time in school. He had to take a low paying job at McDonalds. One after the other, not one single person addresses the sole and only issue that caused this tragedy. James Holmes believes himself to be the Joker, out of Batman comic book.

Anti-gun people would say the same for the pro-gun types.
You have an answer for everything, to deflect blame, using super smug, hypothesis and political venom. Which is all part of the gun culture.
Nobody in civilian America NEEDS an AR-15.

Do you have a fire extinguisher in your home? Do you save money ? Do you have home owners insurance?

 

[chopstiks]

July 20, 2012
One More Massacre
Posted by Adam Gopnik

The murders—it dignifies them to call them a “tragedy”—in Aurora, Colorado, have hit us all hard, though the grief of the friends and families of the victims is unimaginable. Still, it hits home, or someplace worse than home, for any parent who (as I did, as so many did) had a kid at one of the many midnight screenings of the new Batman movie last night, they having gone to see it the moment it opened. Once again, as so often before, the unthinkable news is disassembled, piece by piece, into its heartbreaking parts. After the Virginia Tech shooting, the horrifying detail, as I wrote at the time, was that the cell phones were still ringing in the pockets of the dead children as their parents tried to call them. In Colorado, you can’t expunge the knowledge of the sudden turn from pleasure to horror that those children experienced. As the smoke bomb went off, some of the kids inside apparently thought that it was a special effect, part of the fun, until they began to see “people holding themselves.” According to the Aurora police, the suspect, James Holmes, who is twenty-four, was carrying both a rifle and a handgun. The bullets were fired so freely that they penetrated the wall separating one movie theatre in a multiplex to devastate people in the next one.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/07/aurora-movie-shooting-one-more-massacre.html

 

[Full-Auto]

July 20, 2012
One More Massacre
Posted by Adam Gopnik

The murders—it dignifies them to call them a “tragedy”—in Aurora, Colorado, have hit us all hard, though the grief of the friends and families of the victims is unimaginable. Still, it hits home, or someplace worse than home, for any parent who (as I did, as so many did) had a kid at one of the many midnight screenings of the new Batman movie last night, they having gone to see it the moment it opened. Once again, as so often before, the unthinkable news is disassembled, piece by piece, into its heartbreaking parts. After the Virginia Tech shooting, the horrifying detail, as I wrote at the time, was that the cell phones were still ringing in the pockets of the dead children as their parents tried to call them. In Colorado, you can’t expunge the knowledge of the sudden turn from pleasure to horror that those children experienced. As the smoke bomb went off, some of the kids inside apparently thought that it was a special effect, part of the fun, until they began to see “people holding themselves.” According to the Aurora police, the suspect, James Holmes, who is twenty-four, was carrying both a rifle and a handgun. The bullets were fired so freely that they penetrated the wall separating one movie theatre in a multiplex to devastate people in the next one.

The truth is made worse by the reality that no one—really no one—anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life. That includes the President, whose consoling message managed to avoid the issue of why these killings take place. Of course, we don’t know, and perhaps never will, what exactly “made him” do what he did; but we know how he did it. Those who fight for the right of every madman and every criminal to have as many people-killing weapons as they want share moral responsibility for what happened last night—as they will when it happens again. And it will happen again.

The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country—Canada, Norway, Britain—has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do—as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue. Does anyone even remember any longer last July’s gun massacre, those birthday-party killings in Texas, when an estranged husband murdered his wife and most of her family, leaving six dead?

But nothing changes: the blood lobby still blares out its certainties, including the pretense that the Second Amendment—despite the clear grammar of its first sentence—is designed not to protect citizen militias but to make sure that no lunatic goes unarmed. (Jill Lepore wrote about the history of the Second Amendment in The New Yorker recently.) Make sure that guns designed for no reason save to kill people are freely available to anyone who wants one—and that is, and remains, the essential American condition—and then be shocked when children are killed. For all the good work the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence tries to do, nothing changes. On the last episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” Jeff Daniels’s character, in a scene set shortly before the Gabrielle Giffords gun massacre, was thought to display political courage by showing, accurately enough, that it’s a lie to say that Barack Obama is in any way in favor of gun control. This was said in Obama’s defense.

Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? You can only shake your head and maybe cry a little. “Gun Crazy” is the title of one the best films about the American romance with violence. And gun-crazy we remain.

The horror is touched, inflected, by the way that the killings now intertwine with the everyday details of our lives. The killings will go on; the cell phones in the pockets of dead children will continue to ring; and now parents can be a little frightened every time their kids go to a midnight screening of a movie designed to show them what stylized fun violence can be, in the hands of the right American moviemaker. Of course, there have been shootings at school, too. We’re a nation of special effects.

Read more - newyorker dot com

Oh the Drama...............

Only now should parents be concerned.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

July 20, 2012
One More Massacre
Posted by Adam Gopnik

The murders—it dignifies them to call them a “tragedy”—in Aurora, Colorado, have hit us all hard, though the grief of the friends and families of the victims is unimaginable. Still, it hits home, or someplace worse than home, for any parent who (as I did, as so many did) had a kid at one of the many midnight screenings of the new Batman movie last night, they having gone to see it the moment it opened. Once again, as so often before, the unthinkable news is disassembled, piece by piece, into its heartbreaking parts. After the Virginia Tech shooting, the horrifying detail, as I wrote at the time, was that the cell phones were still ringing in the pockets of the dead children as their parents tried to call them. In Colorado, you can’t expunge the knowledge of the sudden turn from pleasure to horror that those children experienced. As the smoke bomb went off, some of the kids inside apparently thought that it was a special effect, part of the fun, until they began to see “people holding themselves.” According to the Aurora police, the suspect, James Holmes, who is twenty-four, was carrying both a rifle and a handgun. The bullets were fired so freely that they penetrated the wall separating one movie theatre in a multiplex to devastate people in the next one.

The truth is made worse by the reality that no one—really no one—anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life. That includes the President, whose consoling message managed to avoid the issue of why these killings take place. Of course, we don’t know, and perhaps never will, what exactly “made him” do what he did; but we know how he did it. Those who fight for the right of every madman and every criminal to have as many people-killing weapons as they want share moral responsibility for what happened last night—as they will when it happens again. And it will happen again.

The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country—Canada, Norway, Britain—has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do—as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue. Does anyone even remember any longer last July’s gun massacre, those birthday-party killings in Texas, when an estranged husband murdered his wife and most of her family, leaving six dead?

But nothing changes: the blood lobby still blares out its certainties, including the pretense that the Second Amendment—despite the clear grammar of its first sentence—is designed not to protect citizen militias but to make sure that no lunatic goes unarmed. (Jill Lepore wrote about the history of the Second Amendment in The New Yorker recently.) Make sure that guns designed for no reason save to kill people are freely available to anyone who wants one—and that is, and remains, the essential American condition—and then be shocked when children are killed. For all the good work the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence tries to do, nothing changes. On the last episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” Jeff Daniels’s character, in a scene set shortly before the Gabrielle Giffords gun massacre, was thought to display political courage by showing, accurately enough, that it’s a lie to say that Barack Obama is in any way in favor of gun control. This was said in Obama’s defense.

Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? You can only shake your head and maybe cry a little. “Gun Crazy” is the title of one the best films about the American romance with violence. And gun-crazy we remain.

The horror is touched, inflected, by the way that the killings now intertwine with the everyday details of our lives. The killings will go on; the cell phones in the pockets of dead children will continue to ring; and now parents can be a little frightened every time their kids go to a midnight screening of a movie designed to show them what stylized fun violence can be, in the hands of the right American moviemaker. Of course, there have been shootings at school, too. We’re a nation of special effects.

Read more - newyorker dot com

And if it wasn't for people like you and the author of that bullshit oped more people would not feel the stigma of owning a gun and would carry one where they went and there would be fewer no gun zones and even fewer mass murders.

 

[M14 Shooter]

I'm sorry, but I'm missing the point you are trying to make here.

In Iraq, militia types defeated US gov't forces with, among other things, theiir fully auto small arms - they were determined guerilla that stood even when smart bomb were dropped on their asses.
Get it now?

Really? I thought we "shock and awed" them back to the stone age. Remember "Mission Accomplished"? Isn't the final death count way in our advantage? 4977 vs 100000 to 650000? They won? Saddam and the Baath party are still in power? I must have been living in an alternative universe these past 10 years.

Yep - we lost in Iraq - asky any "Bush lied people died" liberal.
If the US military cannot beat Iraqi militias, there's no way to argue that it can beat American militias.

 

[M14 Shooter]

thank you for verifying my point about the logic Conservative use, when it comes to guns.

Really.
~300,000,000 guns in the US. What % are guse in violent crime?
More guns added every year - and yet the violent crime rates remain stable.

Please, define this problem, in specific terms.

BTW, I've made it clear I don't want to take away people's guns - including my own. But I do think some common sense laws and the ability to enforce them, might be an even better idea,

Like... what?
Amd, how do the laws you propose not infringe on the right to arms?

 

[M14 Shooter]

Being that the theater was a gun free zone didn't stop the shooter now did it?

thank you for verifying my point about the logic Conservative use, when it comes to guns. Obviously we have a gun violence problem in America. You solution is to add more guns, less laws restricting them and less enforcement.
Just like the way to solve a fire problem is to add more fire and gasoline!
BTW, I've made it clear I don't want to take away people's guns - including my own. But I do think some common sense laws and the ability to enforce them, might be an even better idea, than making sure every citizen is armed to the teeth, everywhere they go. Go figure.

Hell yes add more guns
You never hear about a mass shooting at a gun range, gun show or police department. Only those places that are gun free zones.

Over the next two weeks, thousands of people, all of them armed with an 'assault weapon' will compete at the national rifle matches at Camp Perry OH. Despite this heavy concentration of guns that are good for nothing other than kiling people, there will be no crimes comitted with these guns.

 

[saveliberty]

A government only fears its armed citizens.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

thank you for verifying my point about the logic Conservative use, when it comes to guns. Obviously we have a gun violence problem in America. You solution is to add more guns, less laws restricting them and less enforcement.
Just like the way to solve a fire problem is to add more fire and gasoline!
BTW, I've made it clear I don't want to take away people's guns - including my own. But I do think some common sense laws and the ability to enforce them, might be an even better idea, than making sure every citizen is armed to the teeth, everywhere they go. Go figure.

Hell yes add more guns
You never hear about a mass shooting at a gun range, gun show or police department. Only those places that are gun free zones.

Over the next two weeks, thousands of people, all of them armed with an 'assault weapon' will compete at the national rifle matches at Camp Perry OH. Despite this heavy concentration of guns that are good for nothing other than kiling people, there will be no crimes comitted with these guns.

And more than likely there will not be any crimes committed within a ten mile radius of that event.

 

[chopstiks]

July 20, 2012
One More Massacre
Posted by Adam Gopnik

The murders—it dignifies them to call them a “tragedy”—in Aurora, Colorado, have hit us all hard, though the grief of the friends and families of the victims is unimaginable. Still, it hits home, or someplace worse than home, for any parent who (as I did, as so many did) had a kid at one of the many midnight screenings of the new Batman movie last night, they having gone to see it the moment it opened. Once again, as so often before, the unthinkable news is disassembled, piece by piece, into its heartbreaking parts. After the Virginia Tech shooting, the horrifying detail, as I wrote at the time, was that the cell phones were still ringing in the pockets of the dead children as their parents tried to call them. In Colorado, you can’t expunge the knowledge of the sudden turn from pleasure to horror that those children experienced. As the smoke bomb went off, some of the kids inside apparently thought that it was a special effect, part of the fun, until they began to see “people holding themselves.” According to the Aurora police, the suspect, James Holmes, who is twenty-four, was carrying both a rifle and a handgun. The bullets were fired so freely that they penetrated the wall separating one movie theatre in a multiplex to devastate people in the next one.

The truth is made worse by the reality that no one—really no one—anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life. That includes the President, whose consoling message managed to avoid the issue of why these killings take place. Of course, we don’t know, and perhaps never will, what exactly “made him” do what he did; but we know how he did it. Those who fight for the right of every madman and every criminal to have as many people-killing weapons as they want share moral responsibility for what happened last night—as they will when it happens again. And it will happen again.

The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country—Canada, Norway, Britain—has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do—as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue. Does anyone even remember any longer last July’s gun massacre, those birthday-party killings in Texas, when an estranged husband murdered his wife and most of her family, leaving six dead?

But nothing changes: the blood lobby still blares out its certainties, including the pretense that the Second Amendment—despite the clear grammar of its first sentence—is designed not to protect citizen militias but to make sure that no lunatic goes unarmed. (Jill Lepore wrote about the history of the Second Amendment in The New Yorker recently.) Make sure that guns designed for no reason save to kill people are freely available to anyone who wants one—and that is, and remains, the essential American condition—and then be shocked when children are killed. For all the good work the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence tries to do, nothing changes. On the last episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” Jeff Daniels’s character, in a scene set shortly before the Gabrielle Giffords gun massacre, was thought to display political courage by showing, accurately enough, that it’s a lie to say that Barack Obama is in any way in favor of gun control. This was said in Obama’s defense.

Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? You can only shake your head and maybe cry a little. “Gun Crazy” is the title of one the best films about the American romance with violence. And gun-crazy we remain.

The horror is touched, inflected, by the way that the killings now intertwine with the everyday details of our lives. The killings will go on; the cell phones in the pockets of dead children will continue to ring; and now parents can be a little frightened every time their kids go to a midnight screening of a movie designed to show them what stylized fun violence can be, in the hands of the right American moviemaker. Of course, there have been shootings at school, too. We’re a nation of special effects.

Read more - newyorker dot com

And if it wasn't for people like you and the author of that bullshit oped more people would not feel the stigma of owning a gun and would carry one where they went and there would be fewer no gun zones and even fewer mass murders.

Oh please accept my apology all you poor folk who feel threatened by "people like me". I am soooo sorry for hurting your feelings with my gun disapproval. Poor petals. Aww, what can I do to make you feel better... Sweep it under the carpet?? Please, how can I ever make YOU feel better about the gun in YOUR pocket that makes YOU feel secure..

 

[bigrebnc1775]

July 20, 2012
One More Massacre
Posted by Adam Gopnik

The murders—it dignifies them to call them a “tragedy”—in Aurora, Colorado, have hit us all hard, though the grief of the friends and families of the victims is unimaginable. Still, it hits home, or someplace worse than home, for any parent who (as I did, as so many did) had a kid at one of the many midnight screenings of the new Batman movie last night, they having gone to see it the moment it opened. Once again, as so often before, the unthinkable news is disassembled, piece by piece, into its heartbreaking parts. After the Virginia Tech shooting, the horrifying detail, as I wrote at the time, was that the cell phones were still ringing in the pockets of the dead children as their parents tried to call them. In Colorado, you can’t expunge the knowledge of the sudden turn from pleasure to horror that those children experienced. As the smoke bomb went off, some of the kids inside apparently thought that it was a special effect, part of the fun, until they began to see “people holding themselves.” According to the Aurora police, the suspect, James Holmes, who is twenty-four, was carrying both a rifle and a handgun. The bullets were fired so freely that they penetrated the wall separating one movie theatre in a multiplex to devastate people in the next one.

The truth is made worse by the reality that no one—really no one—anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life. That includes the President, whose consoling message managed to avoid the issue of why these killings take place. Of course, we don’t know, and perhaps never will, what exactly “made him” do what he did; but we know how he did it. Those who fight for the right of every madman and every criminal to have as many people-killing weapons as they want share moral responsibility for what happened last night—as they will when it happens again. And it will happen again.

The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country—Canada, Norway, Britain—has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do—as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue. Does anyone even remember any longer last July’s gun massacre, those birthday-party killings in Texas, when an estranged husband murdered his wife and most of her family, leaving six dead?

But nothing changes: the blood lobby still blares out its certainties, including the pretense that the Second Amendment—despite the clear grammar of its first sentence—is designed not to protect citizen militias but to make sure that no lunatic goes unarmed. (Jill Lepore wrote about the history of the Second Amendment in The New Yorker recently.) Make sure that guns designed for no reason save to kill people are freely available to anyone who wants one—and that is, and remains, the essential American condition—and then be shocked when children are killed. For all the good work the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence tries to do, nothing changes. On the last episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” Jeff Daniels’s character, in a scene set shortly before the Gabrielle Giffords gun massacre, was thought to display political courage by showing, accurately enough, that it’s a lie to say that Barack Obama is in any way in favor of gun control. This was said in Obama’s defense.

Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? You can only shake your head and maybe cry a little. “Gun Crazy” is the title of one the best films about the American romance with violence. And gun-crazy we remain.

The horror is touched, inflected, by the way that the killings now intertwine with the everyday details of our lives. The killings will go on; the cell phones in the pockets of dead children will continue to ring; and now parents can be a little frightened every time their kids go to a midnight screening of a movie designed to show them what stylized fun violence can be, in the hands of the right American moviemaker. Of course, there have been shootings at school, too. We’re a nation of special effects.

Read more - newyorker dot com

And if it wasn't for people like you and the author of that bullshit oped more people would not feel the stigma of owning a gun and would carry one where they went and there would be fewer no gun zones and even fewer mass murders.

Oh please accept my apology all you poor folk who feel threatened by "people like me". I am soooo sorry for hurting your feelings with my gun disapproval. Poor petals. Aww, what can I do to make you feel better... Sweep it under the carpet?? Please, how can I ever make YOU feel better about the gun in YOUR pocket that makes YOU feel secure..

I don't need a fucking thing baby, I'm not the one living in fear wanting more gun control.

 

[Full-Auto]

July 20, 2012
One More Massacre
Posted by Adam Gopnik

The murders—it dignifies them to call them a “tragedy”—in Aurora, Colorado, have hit us all hard, though the grief of the friends and families of the victims is unimaginable. Still, it hits home, or someplace worse than home, for any parent who (as I did, as so many did) had a kid at one of the many midnight screenings of the new Batman movie last night, they having gone to see it the moment it opened. Once again, as so often before, the unthinkable news is disassembled, piece by piece, into its heartbreaking parts. After the Virginia Tech shooting, the horrifying detail, as I wrote at the time, was that the cell phones were still ringing in the pockets of the dead children as their parents tried to call them. In Colorado, you can’t expunge the knowledge of the sudden turn from pleasure to horror that those children experienced. As the smoke bomb went off, some of the kids inside apparently thought that it was a special effect, part of the fun, until they began to see “people holding themselves.” According to the Aurora police, the suspect, James Holmes, who is twenty-four, was carrying both a rifle and a handgun. The bullets were fired so freely that they penetrated the wall separating one movie theatre in a multiplex to devastate people in the next one.

The truth is made worse by the reality that no one—really no one—anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life. That includes the President, whose consoling message managed to avoid the issue of why these killings take place. Of course, we don’t know, and perhaps never will, what exactly “made him” do what he did; but we know how he did it. Those who fight for the right of every madman and every criminal to have as many people-killing weapons as they want share moral responsibility for what happened last night—as they will when it happens again. And it will happen again.

The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country—Canada, Norway, Britain—has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do—as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue. Does anyone even remember any longer last July’s gun massacre, those birthday-party killings in Texas, when an estranged husband murdered his wife and most of her family, leaving six dead?

But nothing changes: the blood lobby still blares out its certainties, including the pretense that the Second Amendment—despite the clear grammar of its first sentence—is designed not to protect citizen militias but to make sure that no lunatic goes unarmed. (Jill Lepore wrote about the history of the Second Amendment in The New Yorker recently.) Make sure that guns designed for no reason save to kill people are freely available to anyone who wants one—and that is, and remains, the essential American condition—and then be shocked when children are killed. For all the good work the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence tries to do, nothing changes. On the last episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” Jeff Daniels’s character, in a scene set shortly before the Gabrielle Giffords gun massacre, was thought to display political courage by showing, accurately enough, that it’s a lie to say that Barack Obama is in any way in favor of gun control. This was said in Obama’s defense.

Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? You can only shake your head and maybe cry a little. “Gun Crazy” is the title of one the best films about the American romance with violence. And gun-crazy we remain.

The horror is touched, inflected, by the way that the killings now intertwine with the everyday details of our lives. The killings will go on; the cell phones in the pockets of dead children will continue to ring; and now parents can be a little frightened every time their kids go to a midnight screening of a movie designed to show them what stylized fun violence can be, in the hands of the right American moviemaker. Of course, there have been shootings at school, too. We’re a nation of special effects.

Read more - newyorker dot com

And if it wasn't for people like you and the author of that bullshit oped more people would not feel the stigma of owning a gun and would carry one where they went and there would be fewer no gun zones and even fewer mass murders.

Oh please accept my apology all you poor folk who feel threatened by "people like me". I am soooo sorry for hurting your feelings with my gun disapproval. Poor petals. Aww, what can I do to make you feel better... Sweep it under the carpet?? Please, how can I ever make YOU feel better about the gun in YOUR pocket that makes YOU feel secure..

Your disapproval doesnt bother me. My position on liberty is set in granite.

 

[saveliberty]

Oh please accept my apology all you poor folk who feel threatened by "people like me". I am soooo sorry for hurting your feelings with my gun disapproval. Poor petals. Aww, what can I do to make you feel better... Sweep it under the carpet?? Please, how can I ever make YOU feel better about the gun in YOUR pocket that makes YOU feel secure..

The gun was the instrument in this case. With the bombs and other devices this person created, a gun might not have even been his best choice. The criminal and evil persons of the world only fear that which can stop them. Please continue with your little baseless rant on how you think the world would be safer with weapons only in the hands of evil.

 

[beagle9]

This isn't a gun control issue. It is a crazy person control issue.

And that complicates it even more, because it is both...

 

[saveliberty]

This isn't a gun control issue. It is a crazy person control issue.

And that complicates it even more, because it is both...

What really complicates it is people who think keeping guns away from good citizens somehow helps.

 

[eots]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaxOZ-fbe6M]Gun Ownership: Why No One Invades Switzerland - YouTube[/ame]