Posted on 07/21/2012 11:15:07 AM PDT by lex33
There is no way to comprehend that James Holmes, the 24-year-old alleged shooter, stormed into a theater in Aurora, Colo., fatally shot 12 people and injured dozens of others, just as there is no way to comprehend how a dozen people were killed and 45 others were wounded in Chicago over this past Memorial Day weekend.
But the heinous act in Colorado committed by one individual has sparked outrage from D.C. to Hollywood, while the heinous acts by the many shooters in Chicago attracts far less national attention.
While journalists have noted the violence in Chicago, there has been no expression of outrage either from the White House or national civil rights organizations. And powerful people in other influential industries have been silent while the blood of hundreds of black victims has flowed in the street.
On Friday, when President Barack Obama received word of the Colorado massacre, he abruptly stopped his campaign and headed back to Washington, D.C., to issue the nations condolences as he should have done.
Such evil is senseless. It is beyond reason, he said. This is a day for prayer for the victims and for reflection. The shooting occurred about a half-hour into the screening of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, celebrities have also felt compelled to tweet condolences.
For instance, Ryan Seacrest tweeted: Thinking about the families who were affected by this horrible incident in Colorado. My thoughts and prayers are with you.
Alicia Keys said in a tweet: My heart breaks for the victims, family and community of the Aurora shootings. My thoughts and prayers are with you all.
As with the spate of school shootings that claimed dozens of lives across America, we are once again reminded that color or class does not define evil.
Indeed, unlike the African-American and Hispanic males, often labeled as gang-bangers, who are charged with most of the shootings in Chicago, the suspect in Colorado has been identified as a white neuroscience doctoral student at the University of Colorado Denver/Anschutz Medical Campus.
People who knew the suspect . . . described him as an intelligent student who showed no signs of violence, several publications reported.
The victims of this latest tragedy hail from a place worlds apart from the West Side of Chicago where 7-year-old Heaven Sutton was killed while helping her mother sell candy outside of her home.
Yet like most of the victims of Chicagos gun violence, the theater-goers in Aurora were sitting ducks.
This is America, not Afghanistan or Iraq.
A person ought to be able to go to a midnight screening of a popular film and not worry about being gunned down by someone wearing a gas mask and body armor, as Holmes reportedly wore.
Under our gun laws, Holmes was able to legally purchase three powerful weapons that armed him with enough firepower to harm dozens of people, killing 12 of them.
Is there really any good reason that should have been allowed?
This is supposed to be the land of the free.
But youngsters on Chicagos West and South sides have to hide behind brick walls because at any moment someone dressed in a dark hoodie could jump out of an alley and spray the street with bullets.
Two weeks ago, over one weekend, 20 people in Chicago were injured by gunfire. Murders overall are up 40 percent in the city.
Despite the carnage, that Monday morning, business went on as usual.
Because of the Colorado shooting, we can expect that American flags will be lowered and memorial services for the victims will be held throughout the nation.
Because the majority of gun violence in urban areas is attributed to gang members, it is still easier for most people to empathize with the victims of a mass murderer than it is for them to empathize with the victims of urban violence.
Unfortunately, too many people who live outside of the war zones that run through neighborhoods such as Austin, Woodlawn, Englewood or Lawndale still take comfort in the myth that the violence cant happen in their neck of the woods.
But as long as the majority of us cling to gun laws that were forged in the pioneer days, there is no escape.
We in Chicago, where 300 children have been killed in the past school year, know well the pain of this undeclared national disaster and epidemic of violence, the Rev. Michael Pfleger said in a statement released Friday afternoon.
National and local political figures of both political parties will release statements today declaring the horror of this massacre as they should. The question I have . . . will they use their political platform and position to stand up to the National Rifle Association and enact common sense gun laws that stop the proliferation and easy access of guns that is helping create such tragedies? he asked.
The statement released by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a strident voice on gun control, had a similar thread:
The victims of this increased gun violence need more than condolences and sympathy; we need a new security policy. We need to revive the ban on assault weapons now. We are becoming increasingly more vulnerable to weapons of mass destruction. We must fight to remove guns from our homes, cities and suburbs, he said.
It shouldnt take the wanton killing of 12 people and the wounding of dozens of others at a movie theater in Colorado to make us see that, because of our gun laws, there is literally nowhere to hide.
In terms of controlling guns it is working out quite well. Chicago residents have fewer guns per capita and per household than residents of the surrounding suburbs. In terms of controlling crime it's working out somewhat less well, since they have a lot more crimes per capita and per household than residents of the surrounding suburbs.
I am starting to believe that libs are for some reason incapable of understanding this concept -- guns do not cause crime. People cause crime.
Using the pinhead mitchell’s logic we should ban fur because a lot of cats almost choked on fur balls this morning. I often wonder how such defornmed-headed individualks like this low=level, purported “writer” for the suntimes even manage to learn how to breath. What a doofus.
Unrelenting attacks on the Bill of Rights show it’s time to get serious about fascist control.
Open letter to a closed mind!
Dear Mary Mary quite Contrary.
People intent on killing do not need guns. There are a multitude of Items/objects and ways to do the dastardly act!
May I refresh your lack of understanding the problem.
“Julio González, born October 10, 1954, found guilty on August 19, 1991, of 87 counts of arson and 87 counts of murder, González was charged with 174 counts of murdertwo for each victim.”. He was responsible for the fire at Happy Land, a social club in the Bronx, NY. His weapon was gasoline and a lighter. Let’s ban gasoline and lighters.
The idea that the object a deranged person uses to commit murder is the causation is beyond belief and makes one wonder as to your mental facilities.
Exactly who the heck is Mary Mitchell other than a Community Agitator who writes articles in Chicago? I didn’t see anything in her biography that qualifies her to have an opinion of value on this matter. However, she is a strong advocate for the Chevy Volt. Even worse, where has she been on all the violence in Chicago where almost nobody owns a gun legally?
Perhaps it’s time we all take a real close look at who is trying to blow smoke.
Yeah, because little girls and pregnant women in Chicago and NYC aren’t good enough.. /sarc
Who the hell is Mary Mitchell I why should I give up my constitutional rights just because this left wing commie bitch says so?
Rest assured, we’d never hear about it if it was.
“Question: How does an unemployed medical student afford $20,000 in weapons gear?
If you start to look at the really big picture here, the obvious question arises: How does an unemployed medical student afford all the complex weapons gear, bomb-making gear, “flammable” booby trap devices, ammunition, multiple magazines, bullet-proof vest, groin protection, ballistic helmet, SWAT uniform and all the rest of it?”
“Staged just in time for a vote on the UN small arms treaty?
More and more, this shooting is looking like a deliberate plot staged by the government itself much like Operation Fast and Furious pulled off by the ATF (http://www.naturalnews.com/032934_ATF_illegal_firearms.html) which helped smuggle tens of thousands of guns into Mexico for the purpose of causing “gun violence” in the USA, then blaming the Second Amendment for it.”
http://www.naturalnews.com/036536_James_Holmes_shooting_false_flag.html#ixzz21DXlFWJ5
Indeed, and uses both hands to property handle the weapon.
You know its ironic as that was once required as members of the militia.
And practically everyone who shoots, has this knowledge - which is about as practical as learning how to parallel park a tank.
You do not need a permit to go to church, write a paper, talk to a friend - but you DO NEED A PERMIT to exerise your right to bear arms, and the Gov't restricts who can exercise this "right".
Chicago has some serious gun control and look at the body count there!
Dear Mary;
If more of the audience had concealed carry, Mr. Holmes would have wound up as “Mr. Holes”.
How many tens of millions of Americans own weapons? How many of those Americans do not go out and commit massacres?
This type of diatribe is all too obvious, there is no liberal utopian ignorance behind such proclamations, there is nothing but a specific goal from these assholes, and that is to disarm law abiding citizens.
It's a shame that such tragedies occur, but that is the unfortunate price of the freedoms we enjoy, and I would not have it any other way, and I will fight till my dying breath to keep it this way, all the marxists be damned!
Some years ago in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, Dennis Prager published a fascinating opinion piece in which he asserted that all politics are dominated by the question whether one regards man as essentially good or as evil. Indeed, Prager asserted that this division dictates whether one becomes liberal or conservative.
I added some of my own thoughts (at great length, no one will be surprised to read) to Dennis Prager's original ideas which I think cast some light on the gun control demands which are sure to be heard now in the wake of the Aurora tragedy:
The point is this is not to proselytize for Christianity, I leave that to a Higher Power, but to explore how our fundamental eschatology dictates our politics, and in this instance, our views on the second amendment:
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I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do-this I keep on doing. (Romans 7:18-19)
Man in an unredeemed state is powerless over evil. This is a deal breaker for many non-Christians who believe that by maintaining a belief in the sovereignty of their own will they retain their personhood. The mystery of Christianity is to assert that precisely the opposite is the case and that it is only through surrendering the "will" -which is illusory anyway- that true freedom is attained and, even more counterintuitively and mystically, that true "free will" is to be acquired only through the operation of this paradox.
That is not for us to debate. That is a question of faith. For the non-Christian this analogy gets worse and, because this is where Calvinism comes in, it gets worse for many Christians as well. Calvin says that man does not even have free will to choose his own redemption and that in turn raises the question, why strive for good? Starkly put, the Christian confession synthesized here by Paul in his own experience means that there are only two alternatives: One is free because he is in submission to God or one is in bondage because he is in opposition to God, because he is playing God. The latter is in a dreadful state of self deception and self destruction.
As Dennis Prager wrote: "Without God, humanist hubris is almost inevitable. If there is nothing higher than man, no Supreme Being, man becomes the supreme being."
The miseries which mankind inflicts upon itself outlined by Prager in the remaining 13 propositions are but symptoms of this first and most damning declension of all.
Do you want to know why Obama is an elitist? Do you want to know why the Democrats cannot restrain from indulging themselves in the nanny state? Are you confused about why environmentalism is a religion for Democrats and why they are impervious to arguments of logic about it? Do we need to ask why the Constitution, as a Constitution, is anathema to Democrats?
All of these questions, indeed every thing that separates us from the left, is directly traceable to man's proclivity to violate the first and second Commandments.
Why should this be so? Let me have a resort in old vanity of mine:
GOD AND MAN IN THE SKINNER BOX
Attending college in the 60's, I was exposed to the writings of BF Skinner in a mandatory Psychology 101 class. At the time I was struck by the time and energy the department devoted to this man and his theories. Essentially, he put a chicken in a box and taught it to play baseball by rewarding it with feed. When the chicken pressed a lever on cue, or ran a base, it got a pellet. Skinner was able to train animals to a remarkable degree with this method of positive reinforcement. He also demonstrated that negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks, was not as effective as positive reinforcement in controlling animal behavior.
So far, Skinner has not done the world much harm and perhaps he has even contributed something useful if you are Siegfried and Roy. But it soon became clear that Skinner and my psych professors had ambitions grander than dog and pony shows when they required us to read Skinner's Walden Two. Here Skinner extrapolates his findings from chickens to people and causes real mischief. Essentially, he postulates that the human animal is a TABULA RASA, neither good nor evil, which can be conditioned into good behavior. There are no evil people just poorly conditioned behavior. All that is required to have generations of well behaved human chickens is a grand enough Skinner box to positively reinforce positive behavior. Of course, it does not take a socialist to see that it would take more than a village, indeed it would take a federal burocracy, to build and maintain a big enough box.
The mischief comes in when this thinking invades the penal (whoops, I mean corrections) system or the educational establishment and so on. Praeger, in his wonderful essay, has alluded to the effects on education of this baleful presumption about the nature of man. He is absolutely right when he says:
No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.
Let us say that you do not accept the dichotomy outlined by Paul or the injunction granted to Nicodemus by Jesus (you must be born again-as opposed to try harder to avoid evil and do good), perhaps you will consider that the liberal sees man as a TABULA RASA upon which the liberal can write his lessons or, more likely, his own legislation. If the liberal does not see men as good, he sees him at least as being teachable. The Christian does not see him as teachable. That is to say he is not in need of education but of redemption.
The political application of this view can be seen in the cry by liberals for sex education. They think that teenage kids do not know that if you insert tab A into slot B, pregnancy might result. How naïve! These kids know damn well what they are flirting with. It is not a question of ignorance but of willfulness.
The corollary to this is that the liberal sees man as free of responsibility. He is not evil, he is simply uneducated. He has not received the proper stimulus, to put it in Skinner's terms. The mysticism of the Christian is that he sees man as responsible for his evil condition and for his inability to choose good even though the Calvinist in him says that man has no power, so long as he is unredeemed (and even then not always) to choose good over evil. This is why I say that the reality of these opposing conceptions of man is counterintuitive.
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings it does not take a clairvoyant to predict that America is in for another round of patronizing lectures about our primitive gun laws. In condescending tones and with clucking noises The Left in Europe will express their exasperation if not their indignation at our reluctance to ban the possession of firearms.
Why don't we see this their way?
Because our position on this issue comes as the inevitable syllogism of our original assumptions about government, just as the leftists' assumptions take them the other way. Our fundamental assumption about government has been best expressed in the Declaration of Independence: every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because God has so ordained it. Government is established among men (not over men) by men to facilitate those entitlements. Since by definition government always makes war on liberty, we see government as an enemy which must be restrained if God's ordinance is to be fulfilled. So the legitimacy of government derives from God working through men and not from government itself working against men.
If legitimate government's function is to create a space in which the individual is at liberty to protect his life and pursue his happiness, we must concede that liberty is not license lest the whole arrangement come apart in anarchy. In other words, the arrangement postulates responsibility from the individual. Our assumption is that, in ordaining the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, God was wise enough to take into account the human condition which, of course, includes our imperfections.
But it is these imperfections which preoccupy the mind of the leftists and the Europeans. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that it is the imperfections themselves which define the natural condition of man to the leftists and to the European. There is a grave danger, says the European and the American leftists, from the un-bridled natural instincts of our neighbors. These must be curbed or they will do us mischief. It is the job of government to curb them (read, "socialize") and protect us from our fellow man.
At this point the reader should naturally assume that the American conservative mind sees man as, if not perfect, at least rational enough to be trusted. And the Europeans see man as imperfect and untrustworthy. But this is the tricky part. It is tricky because it superficially runs counter to what we seem to know about Christianity and what we seem to know about secularism. If Christianity stands for anything, it stands for the proposition that man is a sinner, he is born that way, he is destined for an eternity in hell and he deserves every minute of it. He is helpless, hopeless, hapless, and undone. So desperate is his condition that he has no hope apart from a supernatural intervention. But he himself cannot summon that intervention (depending on how Calvinistic you want to be), he cannot earn it, in fact, there is nothing he can do to get it. He can only receive it as it is given to him as an act of grace and not because he has or could do anything to earn it. Why on earth would a Christian want to turn over a lethal weapon to such creature? Yet the Christian will trust the creature with firearms but the leftist will not.
The leftist believes that men can be educated, if not to perfection at the least to a level at which you can participate in society. That is the goal. And it is society's obligation to educate that man to that level. So there is no sinner, because there is no sin but there is ignorance which leads to estrangement from society. To a Christian estrangement from God is death but to a liberal, estrangement from the group is death because the group represents paradise. And it is from the group that the individual finds his merit, it is in the context of the group that he finds his worth. It is in acceptance by the group that he finds salvation.
So it's all gets turned upside down. The liberal who sees man as perfectible through education holds him to no responsibility for his actions, blaming instead the absence of condoms or the presence of guns. The Christian conservative, who sees man as impotent in a fallen state, nevertheless accords him the dignity of citizenship because he is a child of God as well as the dignity of the responsibility (and culpability) for his actions.
One philosophy places man in a horizontal matrix and the other puts him in a vertical matrix. The first sees "sin" as a failure properly to interact with the group or for the group properly to educate the individual. The second sees sin as an estrangement from God manifesting itself in his relationship with his peers. That is why each philosophy seeks to redress problems by taking man in a different direction.
I’m sure Mary would be fine with common sense door-to-door confiscation.
Stupid liberal. The Colorado theater banned law-abiding gun owners from carrying inside.
So it set up a “kill as you damn well please” zone inside the theater for a homicidal maniac.
And liberals are saying we need to disarm every one to prevent sociopaths from massacring people. Great logic!
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