Free Republic

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper had the right idea when he refused to utter the suspected gunman's name in the Aurora multiplex theater shootings, which left 12 dead and 58 wounded. Instead of naming the alleged killer, Hickenlooper referred to him only as "Suspect A." At a prayer vigil Sunday, Hickenlooper read the names of each of the 12 people killed in the incident. After each name, the crowd repeated the refrain, "We will remember." "We want to focus on the victims, survivors and first responders," the governor's spokesman, Eric Brown, explained, "not the killer." Victim Jessica Ghawi's brother Jordan was...

AURORA, Colo. – James Holmes, the accused gunman in last Friday's midnight movie massacre in Colorado, mailed a notebook "full of details about how he was going to kill people" to a University of Colorado psychiatrist before the attack, but the parcel sat unopened in a mailroom for as long as a week before its discovery Monday, a law enforcement source told FoxNews.com.

Accused movie theater gunman James Holmes is spitting at jail officers so frequently that at one point he was made to wear a face guard, sources told ABC News. Holmes' odd behavior was first seen by the public when he appeared in court Monday looking dazed, alternately bug-eyed and nodding with his eyes closing. But ABC News has learned that his loopy court appearance was just one of several bizarre behaviors. In the hours after his arrest Friday for the massacre at the Aurora, Colo., movie theater, Holmes stared at the wall in the Arapahoe Police Headquarters with his eyebrows...

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) - James Holmes, the alleged gunman in the recent theater shooting that left 12 dead in Aurora, Colo., was previously awarded a $26,000 federal grant. WNEW News reports that Holmes was awarded a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. NIH is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It gave the graduate student a $26,000 stipend and paid his tuition for the highly competitive neuroscience program at the University of Colorado in Denver. Holmes was one of six neuroscience students at the school to get the grant money. http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/07/24/james-holmes-received-26k-grant-from-bethesda-based-national-institutes-of-health/

Hanged census-taker Bill Sparkman in rural Kentucky fueled media speculation that he’d been killed by anti-government Tea Partiers. In fact, he’d killed himselfe. Joe Stack flew his small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. The media immediately suggested that the anti-tax rhetoric of the Tea Party led to the attack. In fact, Stack’s suicide note quoted the Communist Manifesto. A professor at the University of Alabama, Amy Bishop, shot and killed three colleagues at a faculty meeting. The Tea Party came under immediate suspicion. But Bishop was a lifelong Democrat and Obama donor. John Patrick Bedell shot two...

More Americans want to protect their right to own guns In the wake of the Colorado shooting, celebrities who tweeted about the need for tighter gun controls in the U.S. seem to be out of step with the majority of Americans who are more concerned with protecting their right to own guns, a trend that may be traced back to President Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency in 2009.

Rep. Jackson Lee will seek meeting with NRA about response to Colo. shootings By Pete Kasperowicz - 07/23/12 09:23 PM ET Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) said late Monday that she would seek a meeting with the National Rifle Association (NRA) to see if there are any ways to find an agreement on how to prevent tragedies like the one last week in Colorado, where one shooter killed 12 and wounded nearly 60 others in a movie theater. "I'm going to invite the National Rifle Association to one of my meetings," she said on the House floor late Monday. "I...

Who wasn't shocked and disheartened by yet another tragic mass shooting, this time in Aurora, Colo.? Like millions of Americans, my wife, Gena, and I send our heartfelt condolences and prayers to the victims of this murderous spree and their families. We, too, commend the heroes who gave their lives to save others. Truly, every victim of this reprehensible executioner is in some way heroic, for the victims were injured or died in the midst of a culture war in which even our theaters and schools have become battlegrounds. Moreover, we salute and support the Colorado peace officers, emergency...

Anyone remember a fourth-century-BC Greek named Herostratus? He's the guy whose name history has recorded solely on account of his having burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, in 356 BCE -- so that history would record his name. In a 1993 paper called "Ethical Problems of Mass Murder Coverage in the Mass Media, published in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Clayton Cramer explored a variation on the question my colleague Robert Wright is rightly asking now, following Roger Ebert's New York Times op-ed on Friday: Given that intense media...

The mainstream media met our level of expectation last week by immediately – and wrongly – identifying the shooter in Aurora, Colo., as a member of the Tea Party. Congratulations to ABC for living down to what we have come to expect of the MSM – bash first, ask questions later. But wasn’t the presumed shooter more right than left? Wasn’t he one of those religious fanatics? After all, his parents attend church...

As NewsBusters previously reported, ABC's Brian Ross on Friday falsely accused a Tea Party member of being the "James" Holmes that orchestrated the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado. "Jim" Holmes during an interview with the Daily Caller had some harsh words for his accuser saying, "What kind of idiot makes that kind of statement?” “Really, seriously, how do we take a journalist seriously when it’s pretty clear they really haven’t done any sort of check on their facts?” told the Caller's Alex Pappas: Holmes informed Pappas that ABC News didn’t contact him before Ross went on air. In fact,...

Please don't flame me... but something has me confused. WHY can people buy canisters of tear gas?

At Columbine, I have seen this before. But not up close. As a church pastor in Denver, I have worked as a chaplain with several police and fire departments. I was privileged to counsel parents just hours after the Littleton Columbine shootings. However, in this new tragedy at the Aurora Theater Dark Night shooting, one of the victims was a 22 year old woman from my church, Petra Anderson (pronounced Pay-tra). Petra went to the movies with two young friends who are biking across America. You and I have been inundated with news about what happened next. A joyful movie...

During the chaotic aftermath of the Colorado shooting on Friday, a particularly chilling moment came when ABC News spoke to the mother of suspect James Holmes by phone. The network reported that the woman, reached in California, "told ABC News her son was likely the alleged culprit, saying, 'You have the right person.'" The article also said that Holmes's mother was "apparently speaking on gut instinct" when she "immediately expressed concern her son may be involved in the shooting death of at least 12 people overnight." Today, she disputed that account, claiming her quotes were misused. If true, that would...

A professor in the Aurora area has started a petition to repeal Colorado’s Concealed Carry Act, in light of the recent mass-shooting that took place last week.Professor Chad Kautzer launched the online petition at Change.org in an effort to help “protect the health and safety of University of Colorado employees and students.” Earlier this year, the Colorado Supreme Court overturned CUD’s ban on concealed weapons, ruling that Colorado’s Concealed Carry Act applied to college campuses. Now students who meet the state’s qualifications to carry a concealed weapon can do so on campus. “University campuses are places of work and study,”...

I have a question. If 20% of the adults in that Colorado theater had been armed with a handgun and trained in its use, how many people would have died in addition to the shooter? I think the answer is clear: fewer. The reason why so many died is that 99% of the people in that theater were unarmed. There was only one exception. I offer a proposition: "Armed and dangerous" is an inescapable concept. There is no such thing as "unarmed and safe." There is only the question of which person or group is armed and dangerous. It would...

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(Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has backed gun control measures in the past, said on Monday that additional laws would not have stopped last week's massacre in a Colorado movie theater. "I still believe that the Second Amendment is the right course to preserve and defend and don't believe that new laws are going to make a difference in this type of tragedy," Romney told CNBC's Lawrence Kudlow in an interview. Both Romney and his opponent, Democratic President Barack Obama, have demurred on the prospect of new gun control laws in the days since a gunman opened...

Arlene Holmes, the mother of Colorado theater shooting suspect James Holmes, has suggested that ABC News mischaracterized her when it reported that her initial statement to the reporter, "you have the right person," was a reference to her son. "This statement is to clarify a statement made by ABC media. I was awakened by a call from a reporter by ABC on July 20 about 5:45 in the morning. I did not know anything about a shooting in Aurora at that time," Holmes said in a statement this afternoon, read to the national press by attorney Lisa Damiani. "He asked...

It has occurred to me that once again that the left is engaged in another one of its knee-jerk reactions to a horrific event. In the wake of the Aurora shootings, democrats are calling for more gun control. Below are just a few examples of the Left’s continuing practice of exploiting mass murder to promote their agenda for eliminating gun ownership. As usual, before the families can even recover the bodies of their dead relatives, the Left starts exploiting the situation in their never-ceasing attempt to circumvent the 2nd Amendment via more restrictive gun control laws, . Only a few...