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?

No, I don’t feel that guns on TV or movies influences people to be sadistic. I know my dad’s generation watched cowboys and Indians all during their childhoods. Never once have I heard of someone being shot to death with a bow and arrow because they felt they were Geronimo.

The NRA always counters their arguments with: well, if more people had guns, then people would be safer. How? I always picture some Charles Bronson wannabe blowing away anyone in his path, ignoring collateral damage, just to get the bad guy…and when he finally does, he’s lauded a hero.

See, to me, I don’t want to be around someone who has a gun in public. I don’t want to be caught in the crossfire.

Most importantly, I feel that to be a good person you should respect life. If you respect life, you should want to preserve life; in fact, I’d go so far as to say, I’d rather die than take a life. To that end, I feel like using a gun on someone is unthinkable and by extension, owning a gun.

Let’s think about the corollary of that. If you are untrustworthy of people, or you feel you need to protect yourself, your family, and others, then you are going to want a gun. Right there, you’ve drawn a line. You’ve chosen your life and your interests over everyone else. There goes the respect for life, and to be honest, your Jesus doctrines of Christianity. I mean, how many times have you heard someone say, “if someone breaks into my house, I’ll just kill ‘em”; well, you know what, that’s pre-meditation.

Let’s say something does finally happen; you’re at a bank and there’s a hold-up. Provided you’re not one to freeze in terror, you instead grab your gun, acting through the adrenaline, and you discharge your weapon. Remember, this isn’t a police officer, who is trained to use deadly force only as a last resort. No, this is a civilian. Judging by some of the Internet comments out there, I think a lot of the civilian gun-owners out there thinks its completely justified to just blow that person away upon the mere hint of an appearance of a threat. So restraint goes out the window. Ultimately you have a paranoid personality, who is not a trained police professional, acting through adrenaline, acting without restraint, acting through feelings of premeditation and grandeur (oh boy, this is it, this is what I’ve been waiting for), and justified in feeling its okay to kill.

This is not the person I want to be next to during a time of crisis.

To quote Tony Stark, “Yeah, the nuclear deterrent, because that always calms things right down”.

Yes, I want to live. Yes I want to keep my friends and my family safe. But I have to have faith in security and trust in professionals who are trained to handle crisis. I have to remember, if someone hurts me or someone else, the fault isn’t my failure to do something, the fault lies with the criminal.

If someone breaks into my house, and kills me, I’m dead.

If I hear a noise, I grab my gun, and I shoot someone I love, they are dead. And I would have killed them. Even if I kill a criminal, I’ve committed murder. That’s something I will then have to live with all my life.

Of those two scenarios, I’d rather not have the gun. Yes, that puts me in a position of weakness, but only because the alternative is so much more dangerous.

Regardless, I’m sad people are hurt tonight. My heart goes out to them, and it reinforces how precious life is.

It reminds me how much I don’t want to have a gun.

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Update: I posted similar sentiments on twitter this morning; a Florida Reverend who is a member of the NRA and the Tea Party chastised me, saying he was a gun owner who respected life; he had no qualms using a gun in a crisis. (How do you reconcile that one I wonder?) I reminded him if he imagined himself killing someone, he was premeditating murder and was no better than a criminal. His retort: I suppose you feel cops and soldiers are murderers too. He must have been proud of that one, because it was the only reply of the half-dozen that he hash-tagged to the tea-party. Yes, if you join the police academy or the service as a thinly veiled excuse to kill someone, that’s murder. I’ve known plenty of men and women who were either cops or soldiers, sometimes both, and they all hoped to never draw their weapon on another human being. I respect those individuals immensely. The Reverend also said, I never said I’d kill someone, I’d use my gun to detain them. Right, and I buy a car so I can get in the driveway and pretend to drive. Look, no one’s head is clear in a crisis, unless you’re professionally trained. No, a gun range is not professionally trained; that climate, just like a militia climate, reinforces feelings of you versus them. If you’re already in that mindset, then it’s not much of a leap toward pulling a weapon and using it kill, especially if you feel you’re protecting others. I think these people all feel they’ll point their pistol barrel to the sky, blow off its steam and people will run up to them, thanking them for being a hero; it never occurs to them that bringing a gun into a crisis will make things worse, which in my mind is the cold reality.

We should respect life more, not less.