12 killed, 50 wounded at Colorado movie theater

Fri, 2012-07-20 12:32

#2

Boom Boom

Colorado Massacre Victim Escaped Eaton Centre Shooting

Fri, 2012-07-20 12:53

#3

Slumberjack

Quote:
Here the Self sees its certainty of itself as such become the thing most emptied of essence; it sees its pure personality become absolute impersonality. The spirit of its gratitude is thus just as much the sentiment of this profound abjection as it is that of the most profound revolt. Since the pure "I" sees itself outside itself, and all torn to shreds in this shredding of everything that has any continuity and universality to it, what we call Law, Good, and Rights is disintegrated in one fell swoop and falls into the abyss.

(Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind)

Fri, 2012-07-20 15:17

#4

Boom Boom

Tom Tomorrow: Sigh

I wrote this cartoon after the Gabby Giffords shooting in January of 2011. It remains tragically relevant.

Fri, 2012-07-20 15:28

#5

Boom Boom

Louie Gohmert: Aurora Shootings Result Of 'Ongoing Attacks On Judeo-Christian Beliefs'

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Friday that the shootings that took place in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater hours earlier were a result of "ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs" and questioned why nobody else in the theater had a gun to take down the shooter.

Sat, 2012-07-21 01:22

#6

Catchfire

We can’t blame The Dark Knight Rises for the Aurora shooting. But we also can’t ignore the parallels between Christopher Nolan’s grim world and our own.

Quote:
“Don’t blame the movie,” reads a sober post at Indiewire, and at The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reminds us that, however tempting it may be to draw parallels between the actions of the shooter and the murderously anarchic villains of the last two Batman movies, “no film makes you kill.” They’re right, of course. Remember all those infuriating, sententious op-eds about the pernicious power of video games in the wake of the Columbine school shootings, as if prying the joysticks out of American teenagers’ hands was more urgent than prying away their guns? Positing a direct causal relationship between the representation of violence and its real-life manifestation is reductive and, ultimately, lazy—it gives us an excuse to wring our hands about moral decay and cultural decadence while ignoring the practical policy decisions that enabled the horrors of Columbine and now Aurora (two Colorado towns whose pretty names—the flower, the dawn—will now ring permanently hollow).

But this isn’t a think piece, it’s a feel piece, a quick, instinctive burst of anger and revulsion and despair at this morning’s news. And in between asking why? (we’ll never know, probably) andhow? (that one’s easy—if you want to shoot people in America you can always find a way) I can’t stop asking a third question: why there? I can’t get away from the fact that this act of violence took place—with, from the look of it, considerable advance planning—at an opening-night midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises, a movie that (like the rest of the trilogy it concludes) envisions modernity as a lawless dystopia where just such a thing might happen. In Christopher Nolan’s pitch-black vision, no communal cultural event is safe from potential invasion by marauders: The movie’s most spectacular action scene involves a packed stadium of football fans watching in horror as Bane and his army blow the field and everyone on it sky-high.

Alyssa Rosenberg writes movingly of how shocking it is to imagine the space of the movie theater turning, in an instant, into a place of terror and death: “We are vulnerable when we go to the movies, open to fear, and love, and disgust, and rapture, surrendering our brains and hearts to someone else’s vision of the world.” But what about when the vision we choose to surrender ourselves to is, precisely, one of a world ruled by vigilante violence and random acts of terror? Nolan’s Batman trilogy has proceeded on the assumption that what happens on the screen in some way reflects what’s happening in the world, that fantasy and reality are mutually permeable—this is what makes his movies function as political allegories, if at times muddled ones. Why shouldn’t we assume the reverse is true as well—that the grim, violent fantasies we gather to consume as a culture have some power to bleed over from the screen into real life?

Sat, 2012-07-21 13:05

#7

bagkitty

Thanks for that image, Boom Boom -- I just ran across one I think is worth sharing too:

Sat, 2012-07-21 13:08

#8

Boom Boom

Good one, BK!

Sat, 2012-07-21 13:24

#9

Zen Eigentum

The 2nd amendment is fine as far as i'm concerned, it's good that there is at least one country where a specialized branch of violence does not have privilaged dibs on guns, people forget that the US is a fairly violent culture regardless of guns, and two it has upwards of 300 million people(one of a half dozen of countries on the globe), you have to put it in perspective, Brevik was not succesfully controled in gun controlled scandenavia, this guy with his brains and the internet(and no prior record mind you) would have found a way as well.

When the invevitable day comes that the US state has to be abolished, dibs on guns will be a good thing. Also look up the racist roots of gun control sometime.

Sat, 2012-07-21 13:50

#10

ElizaQ

I think Rick Warren has the cause of this nailed. It's because this guy was taught evolution.

His tweet " @RickWarren: When students are taught they are no different from animals, they act like it."

So all they have to do is teach creationsim and no one will ever get shot. The guy is brilliant!

Sat, 2012-07-21 14:03

#11

ElizaQ

Boom Boom wrote:
Louie Gohmert: Aurora Shootings Result Of 'Ongoing Attacks On Judeo-Christian Beliefs'

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Friday that the shootings that took place in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater hours earlier were a result of "ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs" and questioned why nobody else in the theater had a gun to take down the shooter.

More likely then not if their had been someone with a gun, they would be dead and even more people would be dead. Unless they had some sort of real life fire fight experience which the average gun owner sure doesn't. They may be highly skilled at hitting a target or shooting a deer but when the target or animal is shooting back? Yeah, not so much. A 'takedown' even with trained people involved isn't of some sort of guarentee just because the gun carrier is the 'good guy.' There may even have been those that attempted something and they failed.

Sat, 2012-07-21 14:08

#12

Slumberjack

Revolution by way of the gun doesn't appear to have ushered in anything substantially different than what it managed to replace. Energy is better invested in something that renders the taking up with violence obsolete, or at least something implied but put off indefinitely. Surges in the steady drone of violence which already surrounds everything has all the appeal of classical reaction. I think it's clear however that gun control provides more of an unrestricted, monopolized licence to those who control them.

Sat, 2012-07-21 14:45

#13

Boom Boom

The gun lobby in the USA is very significant - especially the NRA and the manufacturers, and it is a highly profitable industry last time I looked.

Sat, 2012-07-21 15:06

#14

NDPP

since there's obviously lots of wild speculations going on with this thing, here's more:

Two Gunmen: Dark Knight in Denver - Gladio?

http://aangirfan.blogspot.ca/2012/07/dark-knight-in-denver-gladio.html

"Two gunmen wearing gas masks and body armour opened fire at a crowded cinema at a shopping mall in Aurora Colorado, USA. Fox News reported there were two gunmen involved and one was reportedly in custody. It looks like we have another Gladio style shooting - Gladio - strategy of tension - getting people scared and easy to control.."

Mon, 2012-07-23 15:27

#15

Bec.De.Corbin Bec.De.Corbin's picture

Yeap, that was quick, we all knew it was only a matter of time before the hair-brained conspiracies started coming out...

Mon, 2012-07-23 21:15

#16

6079_Smith_W

Bec.De.Corbin wrote:

Yeap, that was quick, we all knew it was only a matter of time before the hair-brained conspiracies started coming out...

I must confess, that dirty little thought crossed my mind as well when I first heard the story, though I was thinking more of one of the other studios.

It's a bit penny ante for the illuminati, no? On the other hand, gotta keep on top of the wave.

(edit)

and not that I don't dig the retro postage stamp design, but I sure don't want to go back to the days of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority

Tue, 2012-07-24 14:40

#17

Caissa

There's a predictable cycle of mourning and finger-pointing that follows a massacre like the shootings last week in Aurora, Colorado. First come the calls for unity and flags flown at half-staff. Then the national fissures appear: The gun lobby stiffens its spine as gun control advocates make their case. Psychologists parse the shooter's background, looking for signs of mental illness or family disarray. Politicians point fingers about "society run amok" and "cultures of despair."

We've been down this path so many times, yet we keep missing the elephant in the room: How many of the worst mass murderers in American history were women? None. This is not to suggest that women are never violent, and there are even the rare cases of female serial killers. But why aren't we talking about the glaring reality that acts of mass murder (and, indeed, every single kind of violence) are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men? Pointing out that fact may seem politically incorrect or irrelevant, but our silence about the huge gender disparity of such violence may be costing lives.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/24/opinion/christakis-males-homicide/inde...

Wed, 2012-07-25 08:30

#18

Maysie

Yes, Caissa.

I tried to post this yesterday, so here it is now.

Why most mass murderers are privileged white men

Quote:

Not every mass murder in recent years has been committed by a middle-class white guy. But as Jamie Utt pointed out in the hours after the Colorado theater massacre, in those rare instances where a man of color is responsible for a shooting spree (as in the 2007 Virginia Tech killings or the 2009 Fort Hood rampage), the popular reaction is to search for connections between the race or religion of the murderer and his act.

....

when white men commit mass murder we don’t hear how their skin color, their maleness, or their social class were contributing factors to their acts.

....

Perhaps the greatest asset that unearned privilege conveys is the sense that public spaces “belong” to you. If you are—like James Holmes last week, or Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people on the University of Texas, Austin campus in 1966—an American-born, college-educated white man from a prosperous family, you don’t have a sense that any place worth being is off-limits to the likes of you. White men from upper middle-class backgrounds expect to be both welcomed and heard wherever they go. When that sense of entitlement gets frustrated, as it can for a host of complex psychological reasons, it is those same hyper-privileged men who are the most likely to react with violent, rage-filled indignation. For white male murderers from “nice” families, the fact that they chose public spaces like schools, university campuses, or movie theaters as their targets suggests that they saw these places as legitimately theirs.

The vast majority of white men from comfortable backgrounds don’t commit mass murder, of course. Our entitlement doesn’t manifest in the sense that public spaces are ours to terrorize, but it does show up in the confidence with which we move in those spaces. The certainty of belonging is at the core of our privilege.

...

It’s not that white men are more violent. Rates of domestic violence, including homicide, are roughly the same across all ethnic groups. Statistically, murderers are more likely to kill family members and intimate partners than strangers. But while men from all backgrounds kill their spouses, affluent white men are disproportionately represented in the ranks of our most infamous mass murderers. In other words, the less privileged you are, the less likely you are to take your violence outside of your family and your community. White men from prosperous families grow up with the expectation that our voices will be heard. We expect politicians and professors to listen to us and respond to our concerns. We expect public solutions to our problems.

Wed, 2012-07-25 09:30

#19

Slumberjack

I think there are reasons as to why a general aversion exists against delving too far into the reasons why an average white guy with every advantage society has to offer going for him, would want to destroy the society.

Wed, 2012-07-25 09:40

#20

knownothing knownothing's picture

Zen Eigentum wrote:

The 2nd amendment is fine as far as i'm concerned, it's good that there is at least one country where a specialized branch of violence does not have privilaged dibs on guns, people forget that the US is a fairly violent culture regardless of guns, and two it has upwards of 300 million people(one of a half dozen of countries on the globe), you have to put it in perspective, Brevik was not succesfully controled in gun controlled scandenavia, this guy with his brains and the internet(and no prior record mind you) would have found a way as well.

When the invevitable day comes that the US state has to be abolished, dibs on guns will be a good thing. Also look up the racist roots of gun control sometime.

Are you being sarcastic here? Do you realize what site you are posting on?

What is the specialized branch of violence you are referring to?

What does population have to do with anything?

Breivik is an exception in Norway, not an example to use to refute gun control.

If Holmes had not been able to get the guns he was using he would have had a harder time doing what he did. That is something we can control.

Why is it inevitable that the US govt will be abolished?

What racist roots of gun control are you referring to?

Wed, 2012-07-25 11:51

#21

NDPP

The Nauseating Grief of Diseased America - by Arthur Silber

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-nauseating-grief-of-d...

"...But I do wonder about the national paroxysm of grief, the generalized scream of pain offered by every politician and public official from president to trash collector, the public lamentation and wailing, the sickening enthusiasm shown by political tribalists from every point in the spectrum for scoring disgustingly cheap points off the blood-spattered corpses of the victims.

Yet that isn't honest of me: I don't wonder about such public displays at all. I view them with deep loathing and contempt. I consider them, without exception, to be the smptoms of irretrievably damaged, narcissistic psychologies. Those who engage in such public displays and political positioning are vile and despicable in a manner that is close to impossible to capture in words..."

Wed, 2012-07-25 14:48

#22

Buddy Kat

Waiting to see if and how anti depressants played a role in this massacre....seems to be a taboo correlation between massacres of this nature and serotonin uptake inhibitors that only come out on the tail end of trials or years after the gag orders expire...this goes hand in hand with narcissistic psychologies symptoms.

Far as the gun control issue ..it's looking like fear takes over and more people than ever are acquiring guns to protect themselves in the US ...all I can say is "live by the sword. die by the sword"..a nation that has quenched it's gun killing thirst with this many wars :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

Clearly has a problem ...and they are probably arming themselves for the inevitable revolt / civil war that is just around the corner as towns , followed by cities start collapsing financially followed by social rot...then moral collapse. This is what Canada should be protecting itself from , especially with the conservatives umbilical joining us to the US.

Wed, 2012-07-25 15:19

#23

Boom Boom

CBC and CTV are reporting that gun sales in Colorado have spiked since the shooting - this always happens, and the gun manufacturers - greedy bastards that they are - must be rubbing their hands with glee. After a massacre, folks buy guns to protect their homes, and because of fears that the country will toughen up the gun laws, so they want to stock up before that happens.

Wed, 2012-07-25 21:39

#24

knownothing knownothing's picture

Boom Boom wrote:

CBC and CTV are reporting that gun sales in Colorado have spiked since the shooting - this always happens, and the gun manufacturers - greedy bastards that they are - must be rubbing their hands with glee. After a massacre, folks buy guns to protect their homes, and because of fears that the country will toughen up the gun laws, so they want to stock up before that happens.

Vicious cycle

Thu, 2012-07-26 00:21

#25

6079_Smith_W

Meanwhile.....

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/07/fbi-to-review-anaheim-poli...

Thu, 2012-07-26 14:06

#26

Boom Boom

Fighting a losing battle? The need for better gun control laws in the U.S. - Amy Goodman

http://rabble.ca/columnists/2012/07/need-better-gun-control-laws-us

Sun, 2012-07-29 19:37

#27

NDPP

Denver Massacre Story Changes

http://aangirfan.blogspot.ca/2012/07/denver-massacre-story-changes.html

Denver Shootings, MK Ultra, Gladio (and vid)

http://aangirfan.blogspot.ca/2012/07/denver-shootings-mk-ultra-gladio.html

Who knows? Stranger things have happened. Good doco on 'Gladio' included in any case...

Mon, 2012-07-30 11:29

#28

Catchfire

RUN. HIDE. FIGHT.

Sun, 2012-08-12 05:41

#29

Fidel

False Flag Terror and Conspiracies of Silence

Quote:
A Plausible Narrative / Conclusion

Gladio's successful concealment for so many years demonstrates how mass atrocities can be carried out by a shadow network with complete impunity. Most incidents from the Gladio period remain unsolved by authorities. In the US, however, a plausible narrative appears to be required for public consumption. For example, just a few hours after the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials swept in and wrested the case from Oak Creek authorities by classifying it as an act of "domestic terrorism."[8]. Less than twenty four hours later one of the federal government's foremost de facto propaganda and intelligence-gathering arms—the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)—developed a storyline that was unquestioningly lapped up by major news media.[9]

In an August 6 Democracy Now interview with SPLC spokesman Mark Potok and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Don Walker, Potok explained in unusual detail how the alleged killer was involved in "white supremacist groups," "Nazi skinhead rock bands," and that the SPLC had been “tracking” the groups he was in since 2000. Potok’s remarks, which dominate the exchange and steer clear of the suspect's experience in psychological operations, contrasted sharply with Walker's, who more cautiously pointed out that the suspect’s “work in [US Army] PsyOps is still a bit of a mystery to all of us ... We talked to a psychiatrist who said that [being promoted to PsyOps is] like going from the lobby to the 20th floor very quickly.”[10]

From crazed lone gunmen and crazed lone Oklahoma City bombers to crazed jihadist zombies led by Elvis bin Laden who all hate us cause we're free and they ain't - it's all for public consumption. Nowadays 'conspiracy theory' is newz journalist code for the unspeakable truth.(Gore Vidal)

Americans are supposed to live in constant fear. In the 1950's it was grade b horror flicks and fear of the red coats. The Sovs stabbed them in the backs by 1989-91. It's imperative that Americans live in fear, and if not in fear of nuclear incineration, then fearful of one another and secreting unhealthy levels of adrenaline in a heightened state of alert for non-existent threats. This is what Gladio was all about: inducing mass hysteria resulting in public demands for greater security. We must be fearful but never rebellious. The people will police themselves.

Sun, 2012-08-12 08:42

#30

Maysie

Why the reaction is different when the terrorist is white.

Quote:

Observing that the Sunday attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin hasn't attracted nearly as much attention as other shooting sprees, including last week's rampage at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, Robert Wright wonders if the disparity is due to the fact that most people who shape discourse in America "can imagine their friends and relatives -- and themselves -- being at a theater watching a Batman movie," but can't imagine themselves or their acquaintances in a Sikh temple. "This isn't meant as a scathing indictment; it's only natural to get freaked out by threats in proportion to how threatening they seem to you personally," Wright says, adding that the press ought to give much more coverage to the incident.

....

Their disinclination to grapple with it has less to do with the victims than the gunman. The key factor isn't that they're Sikhs; it's that the apparent homegrown terrorist -- a term virtually no one would object to had a murderous Muslim burst into the Sikh temple -- was perpetrated by a white guy.

....

Attacks like his are disconcerting to some white Americans for a seldom acknowledged reason. Since 9/11, many Americans have conflated terrorism with Muslims; and having done so, they've tolerated or supported counterterrorism policies safe in the presumption that people unlike them would bear their brunt. (If Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD sent officers beyond the boundaries of New York City to secretly spy on evangelical Christian students or Israeli students or students who own handguns the national backlash would be swift, brutal, and decisive. The revelation of secret spying on Muslim American students was mostly defended or ignored.)

Sun, 2012-08-12 23:14

#31

Fidel

Conor Friedersdorf wrote:
In the name of counterterrorism, many Americans have given their assent to indefinite detention, the criminalization of gifts to certain charities, the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens, and a sprawling, opaque homeland security bureaucracy; many have also advocated policies like torture or racial profiling that are not presently part of official anti-terror policy.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich says that scapegoating of Moslems was planned as early as 1991. Neoconservatives, according to Sepahpour-Ulrich, needed to replace the former USSR with another terrifying threat to U.S. national security and, indeed, the rest of the freedom-loving civilized western world run mostly by rich and influential white people.

And Alex Kane detailed how the U.S. Military itself is pre-programmed to hate Moslems. Wade Michael Page is a product of the U.S. Government's policies for fear and hatred.

Note: The cartoon character depicted in the following U.S. Military graphic appears more Sikh than Moslem

[url=http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/total-war-islam/][IMG]http://img...

The slide above was one of many anti-Muslim presentations US military officers sat through (Picture via Wired)

Conor Friedersdorf wrote:
What if white Americans were as likely as Muslims to be victimized by those policies?

There are professional organizations and millions of ordinary Americans and Canadians who do not believe the official U.S. Government accounts of 9/11/01. We believe they are hiding the truth about what happened. There were thousands of whites and non-whites alike murdered on 9/11, and that there is an ongoing cover-up of the facts by U.S. Government. But if one thing is certain about the Sikh temple shootings, neconservatives in government and the military are directly responsible for sowing the seeds of hatred in America and should be held responsible.

Mon, 2012-08-13 04:35

#32

Fidel

Accomplice to theater shootings according to one eye witness.

What if James Holmes is a patsy?

What if Holmes was drugged and then instructed to kill people in a movie theater? With drugs like scopolamine, would James Holmes even remember that he murdered anyone?

Mon, 2012-08-13 14:54

#33

NorthReport

Another day, another shooting in the USA!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/reports-of-multiple-people-shot-at-texas-university-campus/article4478958/

Mon, 2012-08-13 14:59

#34

Fidel

They'll just have to shutdown all colleges in the U.S. because it's obvious higher education is producing defective citizens.

Wed, 2012-08-15 18:12

#35

Mr.Tea

And yet another shooting today, this one at the office of the Family Research Council, a conservative lobby group in Washington.

A security guard was able to stop the shooter and is recovering from a gunshot wound and is being hailed as a hero. He was the only one injured.

Whatever one thinks of the Family Research Council's politics, this act was appalling and I'm glad to see how quickly it's been condemned by leading LGBT advocacy groups.