Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Colorado Shooting

Have you guys heard the news about the Colorado Shooting?
http://abcnews.go.com/US/aurora-col...gest-mass/story?id=16817842#.UAnwNqMwE40

Yes, crazy stuff. Very sad

Seriously. His apartment was filled with traps and explosives. Enough to take out the building and the ones around it. ("The 'flammable and explosive' materials could have blown up Holmes' apartment building and the ones near it, police said.")

PhD candidate too. Different from the usual unstable personality.

Yes. A very bright and skillful crazy. Bad stuff.

I do wonder why this really bad lunacy never seemed to happen when I was young. There were plenty of guns, and I could (and did) drive over to the explosives supply house and buy a case of dynamite with little more than a signature. But nobody did ths stuff. My personal conjecture is that .00001% of a big population is still a lot of crazy people. The same percent of a much smaller population may not get to critical mass.

My theory is that not as many people knew about and, therefore, did not know about this could even be done. And, when it did happen, it came on the evening news with Walter Cronkite, was not on any other media such as the Internet, people talked about it with their friends and that was it. Within two days, it was over.

We are from Alaska, Maine, California, etc. and already we are talking about it.

I think Bert hit the nail on the head. I didn't even know where Aurora Colorado was until yesterday.

You've probably seen bumper stickers "Non-judgment Day Is Coming"

Well, perhaps it's here.

I am probably naive but it seems to me looking at things in the hazy retrospectoscope that Walter Cronkite objectively reported, and the media today jump on the first few details of an event and place those in the prism of "reporting" to validate their own particular brand of the world view, either left or right or somewhere between, depending on which media outlet you are tuned into.
But my son who is 12 summed it up after watching the details of the shooter/shootings and said this is evil.

I think bad things happened frequently in the past, but we're not in the "media" ( as small as it was then) and never became public knowledge.

Additionally it seems we have developed a society that encourages people to go to the extreme, or push extremist and antisocial views and it's acceptable.

The times are not more violent. Just more televised.

To prove that, just read the Bible. Much of what happened in that book would equate to nothing short of torture that would get you in hot water with the Geneva Convention.

JamesNT

If you Google "Massacres in the US" you will see that there have been many, dating back to the country's beginnings. Interestingly, there seem to have been relatively few in the 1950's-70's when many of us came of age, perhaps adding to our perception that they are something new.

Recent ones seem to be more often due to a random crazy, rather than some political or criminal event.

One thing that is different now is the ready availability of devastating weaponry. When else in history has it been feasible to arm yourself to the teeth, protect yourself with body armor, booby-trap your apartment, and shoot 70 people in a minute or two? I am not trying to start a second amendment debate; just saying that the ability for a crazy person to do a lot of harm is now dramatically enhanced.

Jon, I think I disagree with your last paragraph. With the possible exception of a semiautomatic rifle (which was perceived as not very useful), everything he used was more easily available in 1970 than it is now. I owned a semiautomatic .45 handgun when I was a teenager. Shotguns were in every home. In highschool, some friends and I bought a case of dynamite and 200 pounds of ANFO, and went out to blow holes in the desert. No one questioned it. And, no one ever dreamed that you would use that stuff to hurt anyone.

I suspect more that your first paragraph holds the key. That and the instant availability of news which is now parsed every possible way to lure readership.

"Non judgment day" is not particularly a religious vs secular philosophical struggle but rather an easy lifestyle. The odds are that with this Colorado individual, as we have seen so often with others in the past, there were people who had observed his "dark side" but due to a distorted non judgment view did not feel such a behavior was deviant or worthy of alarm.

If society believes in everything, I would humbly suggest society then believes in nothing.

David, I respect your comments and I imagine it was easy to come up with guns back then. I had two shotguns and a 6 mm rifle. But, I was not able to come up with a semi-automatic rifle. And, the amount of dynamite you and your friends could get simply could not equate with what he had in his apartment.

Ches, unlike the kids at Columbine where there were clear signs of personality disorders or the like, my bet is this guy went about his way for months and no one would suspect him. Probably a loner. I HAVEN'T READ ANYTHING SINCE LAST FRIDAY.

I just don't see how the acts of violence we see now are any more or any less worse than the holocaust, Tiananmen Square, Hiroshima, Iraq, Somalia, etc. The big difference is the amount of coverage. There was a body count for every soldier in Iraq (not bad or good -- just made it more real).

But, I was going to post this, but Jon beat me to it. Somehow, what makes this different is the randomness of it. Even with the 2nd world war, as horrific that was and as sick and twisted as Hitler was, one could see why he was carrying out what, to this day, was the worst genocide in the history of the world (at least in that short of time span). But, it wasn't random. Even the Kent State shootings weren't random. The OJ murders were brutal, but there was a clear motive.

Don't misunderstand me. These are all horrific acts when they involve the taking of one's life. But, it seems that when it is for no obvious reason, it leads people to think, "Where is this world going?"

Disclaimer: The examples I have used, again, are all horrific. I do not mean any of them to be a political statement or otherwise. If you take it that way, I am sorry, and I apologize.