All sides rushing to assign blame in theater shootings only leads to error

By David McElroy · July 21, 2012

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,744 people died in the United States Thursday. Because of modern media, though, the only ones who mattered were the 12 who died in Aurora, Colo., in a horrific movie theater shooting.

It’s been barely more than 24 hours since the senseless killings, but I’ve seen serious stupidity and recklessness from many people. The truth is that the killer is a blank slate to almost all of us. We don’t know his motives. Any attempts to explain why it happened are simply a matter of us imposing our biases onto something we’re ignorant about. And look at the ignorance we’ve heard so far.

ABC News reported Friday morning that the shooter might be a member of a Colorado Tea Party group. Why? Because the murderer’s name is James Holmes and there’s a Jim Holmes in Aurora who’s a member of a Tea Party group. Making that allegation with absolutely no evidence — other than similarity in names — is some of the worst journalism I’ve seen in a long time. I’d say it represents the mindset of some journalists who want to believe that Tea Party types are violent people who might erupt at any moment.

Conspiracy nutcase Alex Jones is reporting that the shooting is a staged psychological operation by the U.S. government (video) to gain support for a new UN treaty related to the sale of weapons. In the description of his Friday show, the promo says that Jones “breaks down how it will be used to push through ratification of the United Nations’ gun-grabber treaty in the Senate and also manufacture anti-Second Amendment hysteria in the corporate media.” It’s hard to take Jones seriously, but a lot of people who don’t look at his track record of failed predictions keep listening to him. (It’s not just Jones making the claim. Here’s another site that makes the claim with no rational reason.)

Many conservative blogs were reporting on Friday that Holmes is a member of the “black bloc” of Occupy Wall Street. (Here’s one random example of too many to list.) What’s their evidence that this is an attack from the political left? The short article at the blog link says, “Occupy Wall Street’s main website, OccupyWallStreet.org, has named Colorado Massacre Shooter James Holmes as an Occupy Black Bloc Member, which has been confirmed by Occupy Black Bloc researcher and expert private investigator Bill Warner.” Of course, the Occupy website said no such thing, and the “private investigator” was merely speculating. Evidence? Who needs evidence?

(And another insane conservative response to this came from a Texas Republican congressman who said it happened because of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs.” Yes, seriously. Someone said that.)

More people than I could possibly list have blamed the existence of legal weapons for the shootings. But those people either don’t know or don’t care that guns are used in self-defense hundreds of times a day. I’ve seen numbers as low as 108,000 uses for self-defense each year to 2.5 million per year. The larger figures are hard for me to believe, but even if we accept the low-end estimate (which came from the National Crime Victimization Survey in 1993), that’s still almost 300 defensive uses of weapons every day. (Harvard’s School of Public Health, which takes a hardline anti-gun view, disagrees, if you’re interested in their reasoning.)

We don’t know who James Holmes is and why he decided to shoot a bunch of people Thursday night. Is he crazy? Yeah, he sounds that way to me. Does he have a motivation that will fit nicely into the various narratives that different people have for him? I doubt it. We’ll have to wait and see.

Behind all the attempts to assign blame and concoct simple fixes is one simple thing. Most people don’t like admitting that there’s a little chance that they might randomly die through no fault of their own. They’re indulging in the fantasy that if they simply get anti-gun laws passed, they’ll suddenly be safe. (As my friend Tim Sanders mentioned Friday night, those European-style gun restrictions didn’t stop a lone nut from killing nearly a hundred people in Norway last year.)

It’s a tragedy that 12 people died and dozens more were injured. But simplistic measures such as new gun laws aren’t going to put an end to tragedies. People who want weapons will still find them, and people who are truly motivated to kill a lot of people can find ways to mix legal ingredients to do so. (A fertilizer bomb shouldn’t be too terribly difficult to put together, I assume.) The point is that evil people who want to do evil things are going to find a way to do it.

Unfortunately, some people are still obsessed with the fantasy of perfect safety. When I was in a restaurant Friday evening, I heard someone on a TV news channel bring up the issue of what theaters need to do now to protect their customers. (The short answer: Nothing. You can’t put people into a protective bubble all the time.)

Thousands of people in this country are going to die today. Thousands more will die Sunday and the day after that. It’s a tragedy every time it happens when there’s no reason, but it’s simply a part of life that we have to accept. There will always be evil people doing evil things. And some people will always die before they’re old and worn out. (Do we even need to discuss deaths from auto accidents and swimming pools?)

It’s a terrible thing that the people affected by the Aurora shootings have gone through. But making up facts to suit whatever agenda you already had is a lousy way to respond to it.

Sometimes bad things happen to people. It might be me or you one day. Random death is just as much a part of life as anything else, even if that’s hard to accept. Trying to assign blame and then change a country’s laws to keep up the pretense of complete safety is foolish.

Real life is about tradeoffs, not about the fantasy that we can be safe all the time.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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