I mentioned at work yesterday that he was employed at the theatre and everyone's reaction was "yeah, knew that already." *Shrug.*
At least 12 killed, 50 injured at midnight showing of Batman movie
- Thread starter Dream
- Start date
- Status
Yes, and I still haven't come across the source for it. Puzzling.
And there's one odd thing I haven't seen anyone mention. If he was so obsessed with Batman and the Joker, and had obviously been waiting for the premier for months, why didn't he watch it? On that same note, if the FBI has trouble getting him to talk, they could threaten him with spoilers.
And there's one odd thing I haven't seen anyone mention. If he was so obsessed with Batman and the Joker, and had obviously been waiting for the premier for months, why didn't he watch it? On that same note, if the FBI has trouble getting him to talk, they could threaten him with spoilers.
You've created an urban legend, congratulations.
Precisely. Either way, I find it difficult to track how he got all this high-dollar hardware when everyone pretty much agrees that he was dirt poor.
This is the same flavor of uninformed bloviation we've seen from the talking heads about the particular usage of firearms during this unfortunate episode. First it was an AK. Then it was an AR-15. Then it's some Smith & Wesson thing that "looked like" a "military style" rifle. Then they start throwing around random buzz words - "high capacity" and the like. Some would think that these were harmless mistakes that don't belie some agenda. When they say these things, they're not only painting a picture of the shooter in question, but the whole culture of people that the shooter might have associated with in a vain effort to understand his motivations for why he did this. Years ago it was violent video games. Now, comic books and the geek scene are on trial in the courts of public opinion. The media are once again boldly carrying the banner of blind justice.
Some people believe the government gave him the weapons and set it up so long term agendas about gun laws can be fulfilled
Well...there is this. Despite its unfortunate publisher being Fox News, it doesn't make this any less real. A solution for want of a problem...
Out of all of the rumors circulating, this one is just absurd.
Credit Cards?
I doubt people who consider themselves supervillains worry about how high their future repayments might be. I could buy half a house with the amount of credit available to me, if I wanted to ruin my life, and i'm only an average earner.
And then add to that, ABC News stating that he was a member of the Tea Party, when all they had to go on it was a guy with a similar name showing up on the Colorado Tea Party roll.. No apology for that error either... Typical, and part of why I'm not in the biz anymore.
Back when Columbine took place, the media started using the term "Goth" to describe the two shooters.. It basically became a watchword, used in almost every story.. The "Goth" community came under fire, so to speak, by uneducated masses running scared from anyone with a black trench coat.. I was at the local ABC affiliate at the time and took an angry call from a guy who was a self-proclaimed Goth.. We ended up doing an interview with him and a few of this Goth friends to give some perspective into that lifestyle. I thought it was quite enlightening.
It looks like the usual fearbaiting stuff. Lots of "may" and "could", very little facts, certainly no links to the actual treaty being discussed. The final paragraph makes me skeptical as well to the point of the article.
The capacity of the magazine has NOTHING to do with rate of fire. It was a semi-auto AR-15, and it could fire only as fast as he could pull the trigger - one shot per trigger pull. In which case, 60-ish shots a minute is on the low side of "about right."
I'm glad he bought a crappy 100-round drum that jammed on him! He could have gotten off almost the same amount of shots with two jungle-clipped 40-round mags - It takes but an instant to swap mags. Glad he made the wrong choice there.
I think he is medicated. He is has been in solitary confinement, and I am wondering if he is reflective on what he did.
In June, I accidentally ran over an opossum. I saw the animal convulsing, grasping at its broken nose with its paws, before it died. (I couldn't tell the sex of the animal - that's why I call an 'it'.) I am still traumatized by this event. Do you think this individual is capable of reliving what you did, and to experience remorse? Or is he lost in his own world, and is incapable of feeling trauma?
In June, I accidentally ran over an opossum. I saw the animal convulsing, grasping at its broken nose with its paws, before it died. (I couldn't tell the sex of the animal - that's why I call an 'it'.) I am still traumatized by this event. Do you think this individual is capable of reliving what you did, and to experience remorse? Or is he lost in his own world, and is incapable of feeling trauma?
50-60 rounds a minute would be a good estimate for the maximum rate of effective aimed fire at significant (rifle) range, but in close quarters where he just had to spray into a crowd point blank, 3 to 4 shots a second (180-240 rpm) is pretty easy. The low-end estimate made me suspect that the reporter's record of the actual police statement was untrustworthy or that the particular officer wasn't directly informed about the exact weapons and was speaking off the cuff, which casts a small bit of doubt on the accuracy of rest of the information.
From one witness statement I saw, the perp started with the Remington 870 shotgun, then switched to the AR-15, which quickly jammed, and then switched to his pistols.
Sounds fair, I guess used to pull the trigger that fast when we went outdoor fun-shooting in my youth. I think my finger would cramp up if I tried in now.
Last night I left a blog comment that some people liked in a comment thread of a post about the politicization of the tragedy. The discussion kept veering off into debates over magazine capacity, so I'll repost here since it focuses on movie violence and obsessed fans, a common topic here.
****
I think the fact that we’re talking about guns and not movie and video game violence is a definite sign that our political discourse about the attack was determined by media outlets with a reflexive, unexamined political slant.
Running trips wires to dozens of bottles full of mysterious chemicals all over an apartment in a brilliantly destructive fashion has nothing to do with guns. The same apartment, occupied by a murderer who claims to be the Joker, has Batman posters and collectibles all over the place, and his attack closely mirrors Batman stories. In jail, the perp is spitting on people and claiming to the be the Joker.
He didn’t know not to use an AR-15 in a situation where reliability was paramount and accuracy was unimportant. He didn’t know not to try and use a 100-round drum magazine, which would be better terms a 10 shot magazine that you have to unjam 10 times, and he apparently didn’t have the experience to reflexively clear the inevitable and almost immediate jam brought on by his poor choice of weapons. His lack of a gun sense would explain he took a pump shotgun to what he planned as a shooting spree in a crowded theater (“…5, 6, 7. Okay, I’ve reloaded! Hey, where’d everybody go?”)
He was apparently not very good with guns or knowledgeable about guns, recently came from a state where guns are all but forbidden, and had only even owned guns for a few months prior to the attack. He was not a gun nut, he was a violent nut.
His toll was, I think, exceed by a drunk guy in New Orleans who sprayed lighter fluid all over the steps of an upstairs gay bar, lit it, and ran. If the Aurora attacker hadn’t had the ability to use guns, and use them poorly, he’d have used all those bombs and incendiaries he was making and the immediate death toll could’ve been in the many hundreds, worse than the Beverly Hills Superclub fire, and potentially rivaling the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire which killed multiple hundreds.
Accidental theater fires have killed over 600 in a single event, and all theater doors open outwards, not inwards, because of a tragedy in Britain where almost two hundred children were crushed to death in a toy giveaway gone horribly wrong. Outward opening doors can be trivially blocked from the outside with anything from a stake in the ground to a 2×4 propped against the door handle, and someone going to this level of planning and preparation who was already making incendiary booby traps is everyone’s worst nightmare. We see fire exits and emergency exits everywhere, in every building, for a very, very good reason based on past tragedies that are hard for us to imagine.
Where this becomes really disturbing is that incendiary booby traps to kill large crowds in public spaces has been a recurring theme in Batman movies. Another theme has been brain destroying drugs released on the general population, and this guy was studying neurobiology. Some easily synthesized chemicals can do horrifying damage, from the obvious and fatal nerve gases to drugs like MPTP which causes induced Parkinson’s disease, discovered when a college chemistry student screwed up making a synthetic opiate for illegal use. If the perpetrator had spent more time thinking and less time buying the wrong guns for the wrong application, everone there that night might be either dead or spending the rest of their short lives in a wheel chair breathing through a machine, twitching uncontrollably, perhaps screaming in terror, because the Batman film franchise keeps looking for innovative ways to come up with ever more diabolical villains, since a hero’s might and greatness is determined by the might and evil of the villains he fights.
But to be entertaining, we want our movie heroes to fight diabolical villains, and more importantly to defeat them. Not only defeat them, but to act in such a way as to win our loyalty to their character instead of that of the villain. And that’s where the last Batman movie failed. Heath Ledger got the awards and accolades, and acted circles around Christain Bale, which is no small feat. The writers, directors, and Heath Ledger produced a villain who was more compelling than the hero, and that villain was bent on inflicting mass murder and chaos. Ledger made you believe in his character and his cause. see the logic, necessity, and inevitable victory of it.
The battle between good and evil is a battle over the minds and hearts of men. In the last Batman movie, evil out-acted good, and evil won one heart and mind who would go on to scar us all. I don’t know if this is what haunted Heath and kept him from sleeping, but perhaps descending into the hell of a psychotic mass murderer, even a comic book one, leaves scars of its own when you go all the way.
But instead of those discussions, we’re talking about magazine capacities. In an alternate, but earily similar universe, the discussion after 9/11 was “Are Boeings too big and too fast?”
****
I think the fact that we’re talking about guns and not movie and video game violence is a definite sign that our political discourse about the attack was determined by media outlets with a reflexive, unexamined political slant.
Running trips wires to dozens of bottles full of mysterious chemicals all over an apartment in a brilliantly destructive fashion has nothing to do with guns. The same apartment, occupied by a murderer who claims to be the Joker, has Batman posters and collectibles all over the place, and his attack closely mirrors Batman stories. In jail, the perp is spitting on people and claiming to the be the Joker.
He didn’t know not to use an AR-15 in a situation where reliability was paramount and accuracy was unimportant. He didn’t know not to try and use a 100-round drum magazine, which would be better terms a 10 shot magazine that you have to unjam 10 times, and he apparently didn’t have the experience to reflexively clear the inevitable and almost immediate jam brought on by his poor choice of weapons. His lack of a gun sense would explain he took a pump shotgun to what he planned as a shooting spree in a crowded theater (“…5, 6, 7. Okay, I’ve reloaded! Hey, where’d everybody go?”)
He was apparently not very good with guns or knowledgeable about guns, recently came from a state where guns are all but forbidden, and had only even owned guns for a few months prior to the attack. He was not a gun nut, he was a violent nut.
His toll was, I think, exceed by a drunk guy in New Orleans who sprayed lighter fluid all over the steps of an upstairs gay bar, lit it, and ran. If the Aurora attacker hadn’t had the ability to use guns, and use them poorly, he’d have used all those bombs and incendiaries he was making and the immediate death toll could’ve been in the many hundreds, worse than the Beverly Hills Superclub fire, and potentially rivaling the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire which killed multiple hundreds.
Accidental theater fires have killed over 600 in a single event, and all theater doors open outwards, not inwards, because of a tragedy in Britain where almost two hundred children were crushed to death in a toy giveaway gone horribly wrong. Outward opening doors can be trivially blocked from the outside with anything from a stake in the ground to a 2×4 propped against the door handle, and someone going to this level of planning and preparation who was already making incendiary booby traps is everyone’s worst nightmare. We see fire exits and emergency exits everywhere, in every building, for a very, very good reason based on past tragedies that are hard for us to imagine.
Where this becomes really disturbing is that incendiary booby traps to kill large crowds in public spaces has been a recurring theme in Batman movies. Another theme has been brain destroying drugs released on the general population, and this guy was studying neurobiology. Some easily synthesized chemicals can do horrifying damage, from the obvious and fatal nerve gases to drugs like MPTP which causes induced Parkinson’s disease, discovered when a college chemistry student screwed up making a synthetic opiate for illegal use. If the perpetrator had spent more time thinking and less time buying the wrong guns for the wrong application, everone there that night might be either dead or spending the rest of their short lives in a wheel chair breathing through a machine, twitching uncontrollably, perhaps screaming in terror, because the Batman film franchise keeps looking for innovative ways to come up with ever more diabolical villains, since a hero’s might and greatness is determined by the might and evil of the villains he fights.
But to be entertaining, we want our movie heroes to fight diabolical villains, and more importantly to defeat them. Not only defeat them, but to act in such a way as to win our loyalty to their character instead of that of the villain. And that’s where the last Batman movie failed. Heath Ledger got the awards and accolades, and acted circles around Christain Bale, which is no small feat. The writers, directors, and Heath Ledger produced a villain who was more compelling than the hero, and that villain was bent on inflicting mass murder and chaos. Ledger made you believe in his character and his cause. see the logic, necessity, and inevitable victory of it.
The battle between good and evil is a battle over the minds and hearts of men. In the last Batman movie, evil out-acted good, and evil won one heart and mind who would go on to scar us all. I don’t know if this is what haunted Heath and kept him from sleeping, but perhaps descending into the hell of a psychotic mass murderer, even a comic book one, leaves scars of its own when you go all the way.
But instead of those discussions, we’re talking about magazine capacities. In an alternate, but earily similar universe, the discussion after 9/11 was “Are Boeings too big and too fast?”
There's a reason this guy identified with the Joker rather than Batman, even aside from the whole being a psychotic murderer thing.
Batman doesn't use guns.
We could use more guys like Batman in this country.
Instead, we got a whole bunch of sissies hiding behind their guns.
Batman doesn't use guns.
We could use more guys like Batman in this country.
Instead, we got a whole bunch of sissies hiding behind their guns.
- Status