3 arrested in separate 'Dark Knight' incidents

At least 3 men accused of making threats during or after watching the new Batman movie have been arrested in separate incidents, underscoring moviegoers' anxieties and heightened security in the wake of a deadly mass shooting at a Colorado theater showing the film. …

Timothy Courtois of Biddeford, Maine, had been stopped for speeding, and a police search of his car found an AK-47 assault weapon, four handguns, ammunition and news clippings about the mass shooting that left 12 people dead early Friday, authorities said. …

Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies were called to a cinema complex in Norwalk after moviegoers said 52-year-old Clark Tabor shouted: "I should go off like in Colorado." They said he then asked: "Does anybody have a gun?" …

Separately, moviegoers in Sierra Vista, Ariz., panicked when a man who appeared intoxicated was confronted during a showing of the movie. … Off-duty Border Patrol agents tackled Michael William Borboa, 27, who had a backpack with him, according to The Arizona Daily Star. …

There was an incident at the Waterfront theater in Homestead, PA over the weekend. Two mooks got in a fight and it touched off a panic with people running out of the theater.

I expect every little thing that happens within a 500’ radius of any cinema showing this flick to be amplified by the MSM in the wake of the Colorado Massacre.

(But the studio has to be dancing in the streets over all this attention. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.)

Times are bad in the United States. The economy is likely much worse than is being reported. Husbands with children, last unemployment check, bill collectors calling...

Add all of that on the shoulders of someone who was near the edge anyways and you got yourself a time bomb.

Obama's loving it. All part of the plan and not just for the excuse to control guns but to control us.

Same photo but a more coherent article from a Maine newspaper:

“Police: Arsenal seized from Biddeford man who saw Batman movie with loaded weapon”

http://bangordailynews.com/2012/07/23/news/portland/police-arsenal-of-guns-seized-from-biddeford-man-who-saw-batman-movie-with-loaded-weapon/

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The San Francisco article is terribly written. Speaks of 3 events back and forth with no real pattern. Makes you wonder if the author of the article wants the movie to be banned.

I don’t know if it’s the apocalypse, but it’s definitely a sign that something is profoundly not right.

A lot of people, espcially young males, seem to have adopted this comic book as a religious text and view Batman as some sort of religious figure, with the evil Joker being his opposite. This is disturbing in itself, but what is worse is the fact that a number of these people actually want to identify with the evil figure in their “religion” rather than with the good one.

For years now, popular entertainment has glamorized and made big money from images of evil and cruelty. From rock bands to fashion, the constant message is that depravity is good, virtue is negative and repressive, that anyone who claims to believe in the existence of goodness and attempt to live according to it is a hypocrite, and that the power to destroy is better than the power to build.

We now have a society saturated with these ideas, and the churches are too timid and too lacking in faith themselves to speak against them. So people go looking for truth in comic books, dreamed up by a bunch of cartoonists in a grubby office in Brooklyn. And because they have been taught that evil is good and good is evil, even in their comic books, they will pick the side of the enemy. In many cases, this will result simply in personal dysfunction and an unhappy life for the individual and anyone around him, but in the case of people who already have some emotional or mental problem, it’s going to mean that evil will take them over and they will attempt to emulate the cruelty and evil of their hero.

I don’t know exactly why the Batman series has brought this out so much. Even before the shootings, a prominent movie critic wrote an article complaining that he was getting death threats from what he referred to as fanboys for having made negative comments about some parts of the movie or its characters. While we might dismiss them as just freaks who take the whole thing way too seriously, I think they are actually just the more extreme and visible expression of a serious moral problem in our society.

We now have a society saturated with these ideas, and the churches are too timid and too lacking in faith themselves to speak against them.

You nailed it. I wasn't timid while teaching school OR in church. Have been vilified as a result. People simply do NOT want ANYONE telling them heartfelt behavioral changes are needed. They will NOT listen and will attack the messenger. It's like standing up at an orgy and telling people the ongoing behavior at that event is unacceptable.

Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin

Timothy Courtois of Biddeford, Maine, had been stopped for speeding, and a police search of his car found...

Since when does mere speeding by itself result in a constitutionally permitted search of a vehicle? There needs to be something more like probabable cause for DUI, driving with a suspended license, drving without insurance, etc. Perhaps LEO had been tipped off about illegal weapons in advance and rather than risk injury in a SWAT raid on his house, they decided on a more passive approach. Then again, I have never heard of LEO taking the passive approach over an opputunity to play with their SWAT toys.

Thanks for your post.

I think the philosophical underpinnings, of the movie and the culture, are most accurately described as

“Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.”

http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/

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