Post Punk Kitchen Forum

But the weird thing about him being completely out of it is that... he would need a lot of concentration to make those "sophisticated" booby traps and to come up with the whole scheme that he did (all the preparation--the body armor, the gas canisters, etc)

But the weird thing about him being completely out of it is that... he would need a lot of concentration to make those "sophisticated" booby traps and to come up with the whole scheme that he did (all the preparation--the body armor, the gas canisters, etc)

If he was in a psychotic mania, it would make sense...coming out of the sleepless nights and mania.

In the US today, prevention of mass murders by arms control is a lost cause. Mass murder is now so routine in the US that is almost background noise.
''In our country, the mass shootings come so frequently that most of them go by virtually unnoticed,'' Gail Collins wrote in The New York Times. ''Did you catch the one last week in Tuscaloosa? Seventeen people at a bar, hit by a gunman with an assault weapon.'' The answer, of course, for almost everyone, is no. A recent school shooting with multiple deaths rated third-story status in the national TV news and disappeared without trace in a single news cycle. It takes a spectacular outrage or a novel one to get top-line national attention, and the James Holmes massacre was both.

Even the most basic commonsense prudence is now an unacceptable violation of an American's right to bear arms. When the Attorney-General asked for the power to prevent people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns, the US Congress answered with a firm ''no''

1. We Americans are incredibly good killers. We believe in killing as a way of accomplishing our goals. Three-quarters of our states execute criminals, even though the states with the lower murder rates are generally the states with no death penalty.

Our killing is not just historical (the slaughter of Indians and slaves and each other in a "civil" war). It is our current way of resolving whatever it is we're afraid of. It's invasion as foreign policy. Sure there's Iraq and Afghanistan – but we've been invaders since we "conquered the wild west" and now we're hooked so bad we don't even know where to invade (bin Laden wasn't hiding in Afghanistan, he was in Pakistan) or what to invade for (Saddam had zero weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with 9/11). We send our lower classes off to do the killing, and the rest of us who don't have a loved one over there don't spend a single minute of any given day thinking about the carnage. And now we send in remote pilotless planes to kill, planes that are being controlled by faceless men in a lush, air conditioned studio in suburban Las Vegas. It is madness.

2. We are an easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think is going to hurt us? Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, #1 in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated, frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer. Maybe we would take better care of each other.

I'm really uncomfortable with trying to label him with a mental illness. It may be he's mentally ill, but being a murderer doesn't automatically mean you're mentally ill. There is no mental illness that turns you into a mass murderer, and mentally ill people are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. There's lots of reasons why he could appear dazed, its not unheard of for killers to feign mental illness (such as Berkowitz claiming he was possessed, which after his conviction he admitted was a hoax), lots of killers do not have a mental illness, and I feel when we attempt to clinicalize violence we can distance ourselves from it. The fact he appears dazed isn't indicative of anything, he just killed and injured a lot of people and that could be affecting his conscious or he's shocked now that its done.

Oh, I know. Blaming the movie studio and the theater? REALLY? Because going to the movie theater or anywhere else really needs to become like going on a plane.

This incident is truly tragic. But i also really dont like the folks piling on just to exploit it for their anti-gun or pro-gun position and the conspiracy theorists right now are at their worst. I can believe this list of things they have tried to blame this on
Cannabis
Big Pharma
Vicodin
anarchists
Occupy
Tea Party
Democrats
alien escaped from dungeons of the Denver airport
NWO
DARPA
Science
"the liberal way"
Illuminati
govt brain washing
Atheists (he self-described as agnostic actually)
demon possession (I guess thats Christan speak for mentally ill)