Aurora Theater Shooting is Not a Political Matter

by T.L. James | 12:12 pm, July 20, 2012 | Comments Off

The story as we know it right now is that James Holmes, a 24-year-old graduate student in neurosciences at CU-Denver, allegedly entered theater 9 at the Century 16 Cinema in Aurora before or early on in the midnight showing of The Dark Night Rises, threw at least two gas canisters of some sort into the theater, and then opened fire. He was allegedly carrying two handguns, a shotgun, and an “assault” rifle. Ten people were killed at the scene, another two died later at area hospitals, and at least 38 people were injured.

Predictably, mass media such as ABC — having obviously learned nothing from the embarrassing farce they created around the Gabby Giffords shooting last year — rushed to judgment to blame their political enemies on the right for this appalling act. I for one hope the mis-identified, Tea Partier James Holmes sues Ross, Stephanopoulos, and ABC News for some form of defamation, given their reckless disregard for the truth in rushing to link the shooter with the Tea Party.

Is this a political act? We don’t yet know why Holmes (the younger one) did what he did, but there is at this point no publicly-known basis for assuming a political connection — no slogans shouted during the shooting, no manifesto explaining his actions, no known connections to political groups. Like with Jared Lee Loughner (or the Columbine and Virginia Tech shooters before him), James Holmes will probably turn out to have no political motivation at all for his actions, their actual trigger being some sort of personal demons or mental illness only comprehensible to the alleged shooter himself.

Which makes attempts to make political hay out of this crime — and so soon after it happened — all the more offensive. At this point there is no reason to blame anyone outside of Holmes himself, and doing so is tacky at best, if not defamatory (in the case of ABC’s politicizing).

UPDATE: well, of course I’m too late – the politicization from the left started on Twitter almost as soon as the news broke. Pathetic.

I did, however, get a chuckle out of Salman Rushdie. No, not his awful pun, but his smug attempts to subsequently deny that he made a Batman pun. He capitalized “Bane”. There is no other possible meaning for what he wrote other than as a pun on the villain in the Batman movie playing at the time of the shooting. He got caught at it, he got called out on it, and he offers what…the dictionary definition of “bane”.  I mean, really…how stupid does he think people are?

And that doesn’t even touch on his stupidity in hiding behind the First Amendment while calling for a curtailment of the Second Amendment. I wonder why he thinks the First (or any of the others) would remain untouchable if the Second were to be curtailed or eliminated as he seems to desire? He doesn’t seem to think through the consequences of what he advocates.

Oh, yes, then there’s the hypocrisy of a private citizen calling for guns to be taken away from private citizens while himself enjoying the security of a full-time armed bodyguard detail.

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