Life imitates art.

Sadly there was a shooting in a theater in Aurora, Colorado at the screening of the Dark Knight Rises. The death count is too early to tell but there are countless injuries and probably at least a dozen or so casualties. It’s unbelievably sad.

The nerd in me wants to bring up the parallel of life versus art: how young Bruce Wayne was affected: leaving a theater, watched his parents die, became a force to fight evil, refused to use a gun or take a life.

It was just days ago when Rush Limbaugh was on his pulpit calling the Dark Knight Rises a liberal movie, with ties to the homophonic Bain Capital.

It’s easy to draw conclusions and vilify the other side when you’re outraged. When this happened in Arizona, there were calls to tone down the rhetoric but ultimately there was no, ha, smoking gun, to tie a lone lunatic’s motivations to something spoken on the radio or on TV.

Regardless of whether the Svengali affected one person or not, isn’t the issue that it’s on? If there is a hate machine active somewhere that is spouting lies, deception, and division, what does it take for us as a culture to turn it off?

Also, please tell me, how can you advertise yourself as a member of the “sanctity of life” camp when you advocate gun ownership for individual protection. Individual protection is a euphemism for killing. You’re advocating killing, which means death, which means murder. How does that work?

Continue reading →