Ruminations

Spooked And Spiking

Gun shop owners are reporting a sharp hike in the sales of weapons and ammunition. Americans are horrified at the latest atrocity committed by a young mentally unhinged man who is the subject of the latest mass-murder atrocity committed in a public place. A handful of other young men are now dead because James Holmes decided to adopt a Joker persona straight out of the Batman comic books and to commit to a deadly spray of live bullets at a live audience, killing a dozen children, men and women.

He wounded almost sixty people. And there has been a spate, since then, of copy-cat incidents, people making threatening statements, people citing his name, in intimidating circumstances, that kind of thing. And an accelerated rate of weapons and ammunition sales. Because of the ongoing and refreshed controversy among politicians, talk-show hosts, news reporters and people in general, about the usefulness - or not - of enacting gun restrictions.

People who have a love affair in the United States with the Second Amendment guaranteeing their right as Americans to bear arms, fear that there will be restrictions imposed upon that right. They rush to beef up their stock of handguns, rifles, ammunition, whatever they fear may become a lot harder to obtain, and more expensive. This represents both a cultural affliction and a cultural conflict.

Someone has initiated a fund for the Colorado shooting victims. Early in the fundraising activities almost two million has been raised. Warner Bros. movie studio has added their contribution of woeful remorse. The Governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper, announced that contributions can be made to GivingFirst.org on behalf of those afflicted. "The needs will be great and we look forward to seeing the fund grow exponentially."

This horrible event has brought forward a spate of articles about altruism, about heroism, about people caring about people, even in the most dreadfully trying of circumstances, which is what the massacre at that Colorado theatre represents. One young woman saving the life of her best friend by applying pressure to a life-threatening wound. Young men heroically protecting their girlfriends with their bodies and dying in the process.

And it has now been revealed that James Holmes failed his oral test for his doctorate in neuroscience. Which would not have eliminated him for success, but that immediately afterward he purchased one of his rifles. He also, it has been reported by Fox news, forwarded by mail a package containing a binder to his psychiatrist, a professor of psychiatry at University of Colorado, containing his fantasies and crude cartoons of someone firing at other stick figures.

The entire story behind the story is slowly being unravelled. It may tell the story, ultimately, of a mind being unravelled. Resulting in a mass atrocity that has shocked the United States and the world at large through the commission of a dreadful episode in the annals of people's minds becoming clinically distorted resulting in mass deaths and destruction.