At a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, 12 people were killed and dozens more wounded. About 20 minutes into the movie, a man in his young 20s stood at the front of the packed theater, tossed a tear gas grenade into the crowd, then opened fire. He walked up the aisles of the theater, shooting people at random as they fled. He was armed with an AK-type assault rifle, a shotgun, and handguns.
A man was detained by police in the parking lot and is believed to be the shooter. His name is James Holmes. He's 24 and lives in Aurora.
The one thing about this that doesn't piss me off is that the shooter surrendered. Typically in these mass shootings, the guy kills himself. Then for the next 9 days the media, psychologists, pundits, and everyone else tries to speculate why the person did it. They blame hard rock music, or violent video games, or movies, or drugs, or politics, or gun control laws (or lack thereof). Marilyn Manson gets blamed for more murders than Charles Manson.
With this jagoff alive, we can all learn why he really did it. I already have a guess. He's a selfish, spoiled brat. In his own mind, the world revolves around him. And instead of adapting to the reality that it doesn't, he's decided to make sure that it does. Instead of adjusting to the lack of omnipotent control he has over his own life, he decided to take control of other people's lives.
This isn't the result of a youth desensitized by the violence in movies like The Dark Knight Rises. This isn't the result of any societal problem. If it were, this would be more common. It does happen too often, but it's still not normal, not expected, and not a societal inevitability.
And if society does have a problem that's contributing to massacres like this one, it's that we always look for a problem to blame. We never blame ourselves for our shortcomings and therefore never come to terms with them and adjust to them. And at the same time, we glorify ourselves as being the center of the world. It's a psychological conflict that can result in disorder, disaster, but in most cases just turns people into jerks.
It just seems like in the last 10 years, we've become more and more selfish. And also taken less responsibility for our own actions. We don't try to improve our faults, we don't even accept them. We blame other people for them. And in a lot of ways, we dehumanize other people.
What this jerk did was the ultimate dehumanization of other people. He did not care about the people he was killing. He didn't even hate them. At least hate is a humanizing emotion. This bastard was indifferent, because in his own mind he's all that matters.
