AURORA, Colo. — A gunman wearing a gas mask set off an unknown gas and fired into a crowded movie theater in suburban Denver at a midnight opening of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” killing 12 people and injuring at least 50 others, authorities said.
Moviegoers didn’t know what was happening and some thought the attack was part of the show. Then they saw a silhouette of a person in the smoke at the front of the theater near the screen, pointing a gun at the crowd.
“I told my friend ‘we’ve got to get out of here,’ but then he shot people trying to go out the exits,” Jennifer Seeger told NBC’s “Today.” She said the shooter made his way up the aisle, firing as he went, saying nothing.
Some of those injured are children, including a 3-month-old infant who was shot.
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Victims are being treated for chemical exposure apparently related to canisters thrown by the gunman. The shooter, a man in his 20s, was arrested shortly after the attack at 12:30 a.m. MDT at the multiplex theater at a mall in Aurora.
FBI spokesman Jason Pack said there’s no indication so far of any connection to terror groups.
It was the worst mass shooting in Colorado since the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999. Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at the school in the Denver suburb of Littleton, about 15 miles west of Aurora, killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school’s library.
Just like a video game or Batman movie.
Or life in any number of countries we're "freeing" from terrorism - like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somali, Yemen, etc.
Barack Obama says he is "shocked" by this horror.
Why?
Every week he kills as many or even more innocent people as this 24 year old Denver murderer did last night.
Isn't dropping death from the skies onto innocent people from a remote location as horrific and evil as what happened in the Aurora theater?
Isn't targeting people for assassination who have never been charged with crimes, let alone convicted of them, and carrying those assassinations out in secret as horrific and evil as what happened in the Aurora theater?
Might there even be a connection between a country whose foreign policy involves slaughtering innocents in the name of "freedom" and a domestic homeland where an overarmed populace fed on a steady diet of media and government lies, force-fed fear and anger by the corporate state in order to increase sales, and fighting it out for an ever-diminishing pool of jobs and resources gets horrifically violent?
I bet there is.
But the good news is, if this murderer were to just join the American armed forces and head to a foreign country armed and ready to kill in the name of "freedom", his murderous instincts could be put to good use.
You see, if this 24 year had simply killed 12 alleged "terrorists" overseas or dropped a drone bomb on a Pakistani wedding party from some remote Colorado location, they'd have given him a medal.
He'd have been cheered on Morning Joe.
It's all a matter of context.
And therein lies the core rot in modern America.
The evil and horrors that we perpetrate as a nation every day in our foreign policy in the non-ending War on Terrorism only become horrific and evil to us when we see them perpetrated on innocents here at home.
Yeah you'd think we would be numb to this sort of thing by now, but it somehow is still shocking. Nobody will ever know what got the killer to this place, so I want to be careful not to draw any causal correlation, but there's definitely some kind of correlation between our violent culture and these kind of events. Ads for this film showed the villain standing with an occupy style crowd, opposing Batman standing with a police phalanx. The killer was wearing riot gear using riot tactics against these people. Salon's movie reviewer raved about the movie, saying that it may be a fascist film, but it's a great fascist film. This film is THE cultural event of the year for our young people.
ReplyDeleteWhatever personal reaction i'm having to this is lame compared to what the people involved are dealing with, but I feel it must be noted that no other era or venue would be a more appropriate setting for this atrocity than this one.
On a lighter note credit where it's due to Bloomberg for being one of the few voices insisting we be talking about guns right now. Even a broken clock...
I think Bloomberg rails against guns as a control thing. He wants to make sure only "his army," as he calls the NYPD, are armed and dangerous.
ReplyDeleteThe side benefit to getting guns off the street is an excellent one, of course. But I suspect he comes at this not from a humanitarian perspective but from fascistic tendencies - when the hammer of authority comes down, let no one be able to fight the state's weaponry and power.
But as you note, Lorenzo, Bloomberg is one of the few voices talking about guns and gun control right now. Thus is the power of the NEA and the gun manufacturers.
There was a Dylan song from the "Oh Mercy" album back in 1989 called "Everything is Broken." I keep coming back to that nearly every day. Our political institutions, our business institutions, our religious institutions, our economy, our environment, our families, our communities, our individuals, our world - all broken.
Also, the Hollywood Industrial / Media Tribe is to blame for constantly peddling lowlife, violent behavior throughout the media...Once again America has become the land of hypocrisy.
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