Aurora

Craig

Considering what pop cultural event this horrible, senseless tragedy was (and will be forever) tied to, I thought it might hit home with a lot of the readers in this forum. Anyway, Roger Ebert nails it in this thought provoking article. Also there is a fund to help the victims.

P.S. If you are going to mention The Dark Knight Rises in your response, please keep it spoiler-free (I haven't seen it yet).

Craig

You could also give to Mile High Red Cross directly.

mtgordon

ThinkGeek and Cards Against Humanity have donated to the local Red Cross.

Icemage

I don't always agree with Roger Ebert, but he comes close to my thoughts this time.

My view (which this event hasn't changed one bit) is that the people in the USA who support gun ownership rights are perfectly within their rights to do so.  The 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees it, and until and unless that amendment is struck down, they're welcome to own those guns under one condition: that they accept responsibility for the very real toll in human lives that comes with that right.

Not accepting in terms of personal responsibility - just because someone owns a gun doesn't make them responsible for the 12 dead and 58 wounded.  But there should at least be some recognizance that the price of their freedom is measured in blood.

skyen

Ultimately, what happened in Aurora is that a broken, maddened person decided to take his issues out on innocent people. Guns, violence in movies or games, political rhetoric... none of that really matters. It was a crazy person who wanted to kill people.

I don't think any amount of gun-control would have stopped him, either, because the absolute best-case scenario for gun-control is that when madmen go on murderous rampages, they can't get hold of guns to do it with. It doesn't stop the terror, it only ensures it's committed by different means.

There's only one true way to prevent these tragedies, and that is to ensure that no-one is pushed so far that they choose this kind of pointless, horrible violence. I'm not sure that that's possible, but step one has to be making compassion, kindness and generosity the norm, rather than the exceptional. I won't speculate on this specific case, I'll only say that no-one was ever driven to violence by kindness and compassion.

On a completely separate note, I am in favour of gun-control, for the simple reason that guns make it too easy to kill people. Even opponents on gun-control concede that the only real defense against a gun is to have your own gun, and then shoot first. Against a knife, at least, your fists offer you a chance.

Also, on an aesthetic note, I can't stomach the hypocrisy that you can walk down the street some places openly carrying a 357. magnum, but a claymore is somehow too much.

Icemage

I agree that crazy people intent on harming others are going to do so whether they have access to firearms or not (see: Timothy McVeigh).  On the other hand, firearms are really easy to acquire in the United States, and the sad truth is that in the hands of someone who doesn't care about the consequences, they can drastically increase the level of violence.

Guns don't kill people.  People kill people.  But guns makes killing other people a lot easier and faster, and that's the honest truth.

AK_Doug

The only defense that we have against tragedies like these is to help out everyone that needs it.  It so happens that countries with solid health care, and specifically mental health care, also have strong gun control laws.  It is a better measure to look at class imbalance, education levels, and equality as it relates over all violence.  This yields a stronger correlation but the overall system is too complex to label a causation.  

When I can, I help the people who live in the woods by my home. I give them food, and more importantly advice on where to find better people to help them.  Most of them are mentally ill, and desperate.  They need help and don't always get it.  They are also the reason I don't go into the woods unarmed.  (Well, them and bears, but bears are a lot easier to avoid)

St_Trousers

This one touched me an awful lot. For those that don't know I am in the UK. In the past these things happen and it's awful but I am removed from it. It's that daft America place again is how it often comes across in the media. I've also felt a degree of empathy for the perpetrators. I don't condone by any stretch but there are reasons people do these things and to dismiss them as psycho/whack job and some of the more unpleasant things they have been called does nothing to understand the why and look to preventing another happening. Better to find out and understand and look for common patterns.

This one was different for several reasons. I am now chatting regularly across several forums with many americans who I would class as friends and many many more I actively like to chat to in the very least. Most of them could have been at the cinema that night and could easily have not been around the next day. Were I in the US it is also very likely I could have been. It is precisely the sort of thing I would have attended were things different.

In the UK we have stringent gun laws and in my lifetime there have only been 3 serious incidents I can recall. We have gun deaths but not mass shootings. These are rare and every time one happens the gun laws get readdressed and tightened. The fact is this doesn't stop them happening. We have tight gun laws we have had 3 situations. People will get hold of weapons, the fact that in many of the smaller gun crimes the weapons are illegally owned cannot be overlooked. But the prevalence of heavy weaponry is scary. Why does anyone need several automatic rifles, machine guns etc? A pistol for self defence maybe, I am not a gun advocate but I won't deny those who are there choice or opinion. A personal armoury? That is a little much.

The simple fact is though that a person determined to kill for whatever reason will do their best to achieve that end and  if they have a car they can soon do a lot of damage with that.

Guns should certainly be controlled much tighter, as should ammunition as it is also part of the issue. However the biggest thing is to address the sociological problems that cause these things in the first place. Stop the bullying, the class imbalance, the general intolerance that often goes on against people and you will stop most of these things happening. I hate the slogan Guns don't Kill People because they do, and they make it real easy but the second part is true, people kill people. And people kill for reasons, not because they were bored and wanted something to do.

It makes me sad that people can do such things, and sad that so many are affected outside of the attack itself. 

It makes me sad that so many people come out straight away in defence of their beloved guns and decrying the music/film/other convenient excuse of the perpetrator. 

It makes me sad most people don't want to dig any deeper for fear that they might have to change their attitude to things.
It makes me sad to think that I might have lost anyone in one of these attacks.

Mostly I am glad that those I like are ok, and I hope those who were affected can find peace.

mtgordon

there are reasons people do these things and to dismiss them as psycho/whack job

From a standpoint of public policy discussions, I'm going to assume this guy is insane until it's demonstrated to the contrary.  The age is about right for schizophrenia, though we (the general public) don't have enough information about the guy to reach any firm conclusions.  Lots of people who do this sort of thing end up dead in short order, which makes it harder to evaluate their mental state, unless they have a well-documented clinical history.  One of the reasons I tend to lean toward schizophrenia as a diagnosis in such cases is that the onset is typically early adulthood; people tend to be cast out of the nest at around that age, and social isolation is near its lifetime maximum.  It's easy for someone to fall through the cracks at that age and not get the right sort of help.

With respect to "this sort of thing" I'm thinking especially of attacks on more or less public crowds made up of members of the general population: college undergrads (VA Tech), theater patrons (Aurora), and bus passengers (a bus fire in Madison in 1998 that I remember well because I knew one of the victims).  Some shootings of politicians and other celebrities (shootings of Garfield, Reagan, Lennon, Giffords) fall into the same category, especially when others in the crowd are shot.  These attacks are described as random and senseless precisely because there's absolutely no discernible motive.

I tend to lump grade school and workplace shootings into a different category; those are circumstances where people can understandably feel trapped, and the shootings are more often closely targeted and less indiscriminate.  Bullying is a serious issue in grade school; the closest thing in college is hazing, and its victims are people trying to get into prestigious social groups (fraternities, marching bands, etc.) rather than the socially isolated loners who seem to carry out these sorts of shootings.  I can more easily see where grade school and workplace shootings are cases of people with catastrophically bad coping mechanisms, which is quite distinct from completely losing touch with reality.