10 Dead, 39 Injured in Aurora, Colorado

Don’t do it Matt. This thread is going nowhere.

@Matt

Actually, the gun control debate is the only appropriate response I can think of to the epidemic of gun violence. Certainly, more productive than the nonsense in that quote.

How can anyone seriously believe that the constitutional right to own guns (in their homes!) is not something that would lower the threshold while planning (?) and executing such massacres? note: This is NOT the same as to say there are no massacres in countries where gun ownership is not a constitutional right. Still: “It’s an imprtant right!!” can’t be an argument in a discussion about that right.

From Michael Che on Twitter: "suddenly, fred willard jerking off in a theater doesnt seem so bad.. "

@ Brad

It would be more productive to write to one’s elected officials expressing one’s views (which is something I would encourage everyone to do). If we’re going to have to discuss intractable political issues, could we at least agree to do so in the “Off Topic” section?

That’s a good point, Matt, but this topic was never about film. It was started about the shooting, so maybe it should be off topic, but it makes sense that we’d want to discuss it.

Sue, we’re talking about loony tunes Americans, there’s tens of millions of them. The past decade in this country has shifted things dramatically to the right and given radical right wingers a bigger voice and influence in politics.

Well, apologies if it’s more off topic, but seeing as the shooter’s description was eerily similar to Bane’s getup, I was hoping people would go in the direction of life imitating art, hyperreality, and other such concepts relating to the bitter irony of a killing spree at a film that (I assume) contains killing sprees.

This whole thing is so fucking depressing.

There always have and always will be insane young men ready to snap and create the result we have seen. It’s not about Americans – it happens worldwide. Its not about Republicans – it happens in every political climate. It’s not about Batman/Bane – Any culural trend (remember the Matrix trenchcoats) could have set him off. Once in a while, somebody snaps. The only thing we can try to do, it make it as difficult as possible for that person to gain the weapons that lead to such a high casualty rate.

Thanks to social media and 4chan, memes and jokes about the shooting hit the internet 30 minutes after the news broke. My favorite so far, from a former Marine:

“Fuck. Apparently going to see Batman is more dangerous than being on patrol.”

Now the NRA’s just trolling.

@Falderal

Well, the solution to the abuse of women certainly isn’t to take away their only effective means of protecting themselves from stronger men.

The majority of people don’t want to harm anyone. Do you really want to make it so the only people who have access to fire arms are the minority who do want to harm people? Do you really want to give absolute power to law enforcement and the military and hope they never abuse that power? “If guns were outlawed only outlaws would have guns” — absolutely true.

You can’t possibly legitimately compare the most culturally and economically diverse country in the world to countries with one major dominant culture, smaller concentrations of poverty and strict citizenship rules. Particularly when in many of those countries it’s far easier to incarcerate whoever you want because he burden of proof is on the accused instead of the accuser.

If you think outlawing guns would seriously reduce the murder rate, you’re just plain gullible.

It’s also boggling my mind how one shooter without an automatic weapon could manage to take down 50 people without being stopped. Another example of the violent-natured people carrying guns and peaceful-natured people carrying no means to defend themselves whatsoever. Maybe there should be security guards at crowded venues such as that one?

12 dead now.
Last night I saw Factotum again. The Taxi driver instructor says-
“’The way people live is driving them crazy”’.

as usual, jirin is the lone voice of reason in a torrent of typical freedom-fearing mubi asininity

keep on keepin on, jirin

I really hate the outlaws will have guns argument. The incidences of a lawful gun owner using their lawfully bought gun against an unlawful gun owner are slim. It’s plain to see that if the guy had a knife, far fewer people would be dead. It’s also a fallacy that if someone else had a gun, they would have been able to shoot through all the chaos and hit their target. With that said, I don’t necessarily mind the idea of people owning guns to hunt and they live in less dense areas. The only ones who seem to make out in the whole back-and-forth is the gun manufacturers. If they’re legal, illegal someone is buying them and they are producing them. When the US Constitution was written, guns were pretty scarce. Now they are mass produced.

“’If you think outlawing guns would seriously reduce the murder rate, you’re just plain gullible.”’
How about Japan and the UK?

“Particularly when in many of those countries it’s far easier to incarcerate whoever you want because he burden of proof is on the accused instead of the accuser.”

The U.S. has a much higher incarceration rate that, well, every other country in the world, so it can’t be that much easier now, can it?

“Well, the solution to the abuse of women certainly isn’t to take away their only effective means of protecting themselves from stronger men.”

See that’s what I’m talking about.
The solution to violence is more violence.

Let’s not delve into the actual problem, let’s just fix it the good ol’ fashioned way… By killing.
It’s not about the thought that goes into the act, just that the act itself be allowable…

“You can’t possibly legitimately compare the most culturally and economically diverse country in the world to countries with one major dominant culture, smaller concentrations of poverty and strict citizenship rules. Particularly when in many of those countries it’s far easier to incarcerate whoever you want because he burden of proof is on the accused instead of the accuser.”

Excuse me, when did I do that?
In fact, when have I spoken a single word about any nation other than the U.S. on this thread?

What do they say about making assumptions? Because you’re assuming my solution to gun control is to model our system on that of some other nation.
In fact, a gun ownership advocate is the one that brought up Switzerland. So even the idea that gun control advocates are the only ones brining up usage in predominantly racially, and ethnically homogeneous nations with relatively small populations is a wide assumption on your part.

Terrible terrible story.

And I’m sure that the Romneys are breathing a sigh of relief at being taken off the front page for even a day or two.

Brad S.: It does happen hundredsfold more in the US than almost anywhere because guns are very easy to get, and our political culture keeps making them easier and easier to get.

PS: Our mental health policies also stink.

PPS: But we used to make pretty good movies…

>Now the NRA’s just trolling.<

(yawn)

.

American Heritage

American Gun Culture

Senator Joseph Tydings of Maryland, appealing in the summer of 1968 for an effective gun-control law, lamented: “It is just tragic that in all of Western civilization the United States is the one country with an insane gun policy.” In one respect this was an understatement: Western or otherwise, the United States is the only modern industrial urban nation that persists in maintaining a gun culture. It is the only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large numbers of its population. It is the only such nation that has been impelled in recent years to agonize at length about its own disposition toward violence and to set up a commission to examine it, the only nation so attached to the supposed “right” to bear arms that its laws abet assassins, professional criminals, berserk murderers, and political terrorists at the expense of the orderly population—and yet it remains, and is apparently determined to remain, the most passive of all the major countries in the matter of gun control. Many otherwise intelligent Americans cling with pathetic stubbornness to the notion that the people’s right to bear arms is the greatest protection of their individual rights and a firm safeguard of democracy—without being in the slightest perturbed by the fact that no other democracy in the world observes any such “right” and that in some democracies in which citizens’ rights are rather better protected than in ours, such as England and the Scandinavian countries, our arms control policies would be considered laughable.

Laughable, however, they are not, when one begins to contemplate the costs. Since strict gun controls clearly could not entirely prevent homicides, suicides, armed robberies, or gun accidents, there is no simple way of estimating the direct human cost, much less the important indirect political costs, of having lax gun laws. But a somewhat incomplete total of firearms fatalities in the United States as of 1964 shows that in the twentieth century alone we have suffered more than 740,000 deaths from firearms, embracing over 265,000 homicides, over 330,000 suicides, and over 139,000 gun accidents. This figure is considerably higher than all the battle deaths (that is, deaths sustained under arms but excluding those from disease) suffered by American forces in all the wars in our history. It can, of course, be argued that such fatalities have been brought about less by the prevalence of guns than by some intangible factor, such as the wildness and carelessness of the American national temperament, or by particular social problems, such as the intensity of our ethnic and racial mixture. But such arguments cut both ways, since it can be held that a nation with such a temperament or such social problems needs stricter, not looser, srun controls.

One can only make a rough guess at the price Americans pay for their inability to arrive at satisfactory controls for guns. But it can be suggested in this way: there are several American cities that annually have more gun murders than all of England and Wales. In Britain, where no one may carry a firearm at night, where anyone who wants a long gun for hunting must get a certificate from the local police chief before he can buy it, and where gun dealers must verify a buyer’s certificate, register all transactions in guns and ammunition, and take the serial number of each weapon and report it to the police, there are annually about .05 gun homicides per 100,000 population. In the United States there are 2.7. What this means in actual casualties may be suggested by the figures for 1963, when there were 5,126 gun murders in the United States, twenty-four in England and Wales, and three in Scotland. This country shows up about as badly in comparative gun accidents and, to a lesser degree, in suicides. There is not a single major country in the world that approaches our record in this respect.

Americans nowadays complain bitterly about the rising rate of violent crime. The gun is, of course, a major accessory of serious premeditated crime. Appealing for stronger gun controls in 1968, President Johnson pointed out that in the previous year there had been committed, with the use of guns, 7,700 murders, 55,000 aggravated assaults, and more than 71,000 robberies. Plainly, stronger gun controls could not end crime, but they would greatly enhance enforcement of the law (as New York’s Sullivan Law does) and would reduce fatalities. Out of every one hundred assaults with guns, twenty-one led to death, as compared with only three out of every one hundred assaults committed by other means. In five states with relatively strong gun laws the total homicide rate per 100,000 population—that is, homicides from all causes—runs between 2.4 and 4.8. In the five states with the weakest gun laws this rate varies from 6.1 to 10.6.

See that’s what I’m talking about.
The solution to violence is more violence.
It’s something more like the solution to violence is the threat of more violence.

Roger Ebert’s take -

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/opinion/weve-seen-this-movie-before.html?_r=1&hp

I’m NOT looking to jump into any debate here, I just wanted to address that it is interesting how The Dark Knight carried a real-life tragedy along with it in Heath Ledger’s death and now the third picture is carrying this on its shoulders. Interesting synchronicity.

The poor psycho thought he was the Joker -

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/aurora-dark-knight-suspect-joker-cops/story?id=16822251#.UAmxYvXoZ8E

“It’s something more like the solution to violence is the threat of more violence.”

So, like with the Rotten Tomatoes thing, the solution to bad reviews would be the threat of violence too?

For pure cynicism, maybe a rival studio executive planned the attacK to scare people off from attending opening weekend to keep the film from setting a new record.

@ ULI CAIN

Honestly, similar thoughts crossed my mind. However, all I can really offer – rather than blaming guns or films – is this….