"The Dark Knight" Massacre

Hi everyone!

By now we've all heard about the "The Dark Knight" massacre that took place at a midnight showing of the  movie at a cineplex in Aurora, Colorado Friday morning. The latest count has twelve confirmed dead and scores wounded and being treated in local area hospitals. The killer James Holmes, a 24 year-old former med student at the University of Colorado (Denver) Anschutz Medical Campus, walked through an emergency exit at the front of the theatre just as the sell-out crowd was settling down to enjoy the movie. He allegedly announced "I am the Joker" before dispensing a canister of tear gas and beginning to shoot randomly into the crowd. Many initially thought the whole thing was some sort of publicity stunt until it became tragically apparent that it was not. Police arrested Mr. Holmes in the parking lot minutes later who warned them his apartment was booby-trapped to explode. As of this writing, Aurora police are still trying to find a way into Mr. Holmes's apartment.

This horrific event has some personal immediacy for me. Just this past week I was hired as an adjunct professor at the Community College of Aurora. I'll be teaching three classes of Basic Composition at the college Monday through Thursday evenings starting at the end of August. The school is no more than a half a mile from the theatre complex where the shootings took place. As fate would have it, I had planned to drive down to the school yesterday morning to drop off some HR forms to finalize my hiring. Friday was my deadline to do this. The campus was pretty quiet when I got there around ten-thirty. I took care of business and headed out. Before heading back out to the High Country where I've been staying, I wanted to run some errands in Cherry Creek, an upscale suburb not too far from Aurora. I didn't realize until too late that the route I'd chosen to take happened to go past the scene of the shooting. It was all roped off with police cars and press vehicles gathered as far as the eye could see. I stopped at the light and forced myself not to look out the window. I just didn't want to know.

The crazy thing was, my brother and I were supposed to attend a screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" Thursday night. He'd gotten tickets earlier in the week for a viewing in Highland Ranch, another suburb of Denver on the opposite side of the city from Aurora. He didn't realize until later that the tickets he purchased were for a marathon screening of the entire trilogy, with the final installment slated to begin at 12:01am. When we discovered this, we decided not to go. The thought of sitting in a movie theatre for eight-plus hours with a bunch of costume-clad weirdos held no appeal. No, we hadn't planned to see the film in Aurora and our lives were never in danger, but in retrospect, what if we had chosen to see the movie at the Century 16 cineplex? Neither my brother nor I are the type to attend midnight showings, but what if we had been?

I realize this kind of speculation is pointless. But my point is, what makes these kinds of events so horrific is that they can happen to anyone anywhere. And as long as this country refuses to (or is prevented from) enacting tougher gun control laws, what happened Friday morning in Aurora, Colorado can (and probably will) happen again. By all accounts, Mr. Holmes purchased his guns legally at a local hunting/fishing supply store. But that's beside the point. Legally purchased or not, what the hell was he doing with an AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington 12-gauge shotgun, and a .40 caliber Glock handgun? What was the clerk who sold them to him thinking? And what's worse, Friday morning's massacre took place a mere ten or so miles from Littleton, site of 1999's Columbine High School killings. Has this country (not to mention this state) learned nothing in the past thirteen years? Apparently not. The gun lobbies and Second Amendment blow-hards are too powerful.

We go to the movies to escape, to be entertained, to be moved. This is something we all share regardless of race, gender, or country of origin. Perhaps we are naive in our sense of security? After all, our multiplexes don't require us pass through metal detectors or body scans before we head over to the box office and refreshment stand. Perhaps they should? Perhaps this is just the sad state of the world we live in? I know I'm probably over-reacting but I don't know when I'll actually go to a move theatre again. I love movies but if I can watch them in the safety of my own home, at least for now, it seems like a more attractive option. And, thanks to Mr. Holmes, I probably won't see "The Dark Knight Rises" in a theatre or otherwise...at least not anytime soon. Any enjoyment I might have derived from it has been tainted by the thought that the images on screen are what was playing when Mr. Holmes decided to play the Joker and viciously end so many innocent lives.

Ciao.