James Eagan Holmes shot 71 people, killing 12 – blame the Occupy movement and the Tea Party
JAMES Eagan Holmes, 24, shot 71 peoples in the Denver suburb of Aurora as they watched the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises. Twelve are dead.
What else do we know?
* Ben Leung, 27, lived neat Holmes. He tells the Times: “Nobody really knew him…He wouldn’t acknowledge you when you passed him in the corridor.”
* The Times looks for a pattern: “The Century 16 cinema where Holmes attacked his victims row by row is less than 20 miles from Columbine High School, the scene in 1999 of one of America’s worst mass shootings.”
* Holmes was a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the University of Colorado.
* In the theatre, fans were dressed as Batman characters. Holmes wore red hair and claimed to be The Joker. Ray Kelly, the New York police commissioner, tells CBS News: “He had his hair painted red, and he said he was the Joker — obviously the enemy of Batman. It clearly looks like a deranged individual.”
* Barack Obama said: “My daughters go to the movies — what if Malia and Sasha had been at the theatre?…We have to embrace them and let them know that we will be there for them as a nation.” Had only they have been there Holmes would have been swiftly despatched by special agents protecting Obama’s children.
* Mitt Romney added, oddly: “I stand before you not as a man running for office, but as a father, grandfather, husband and an American.” How politicians like to use the phrase “…as a dad”, as if being a parent gives you a unique looks at mass murder. Holms has no children.
* What about the guns? The Times says:
In 2010 fewer than 100 people were murdered with a firearm in the UK. The equivalent figure for the US, with a population five times larger, was 8,775. The fewer guns in circulation, such statistics suggest, the fewer people suffer their effects….The UK also has very strict gun laws. They did not prevent Michael Ryan shooting dead 16 people in Hungerford, or Thomas Hamilton shooting dead 17 people in Dunblane, or Derrick Bird shooting dead 12 people in Cumbria. All three men used legally held, licensed weapons.
* Holmes had on his possession at the time of his arrest, and AR15 semi-automatic assault rifle, a Remington shotgun and two Glock handguns. He had no criminal record. The guns had been bought legally in Colorado.
Witnesses speak out:
* Trey Freeman: “He looked so calm when he did it, it was scary, He waited for both bombs to explode before he did anything. Then after both of them exploded, that’s when he began to shoot.”
* Chandler Brannon: “I told my girlfriend to just play dead. All I could see was a silhouette.”
* Zackary Golditch: “We were just watching the movie and up to the right it sounded liked some firecrackers went off. A guy got shot in the arm. I turned around, and it hits me in the back of the neck and I am yelling and screaming.”
* Jennifer Seeger: “I was just a deer in headlights. I didn’t know what to do. There were bullet casings just falling on my head, they were burning my forehead. Every few seconds it was just boom, boom, boom. He would reload and shoot and anyone who would try to leave would just get killed.”
* Shayla Roeder: “She just had this horrible look in her eyes. We made eye contact and I could tell she was not all right.”
* Holmes’ victims included a baby, aged four months.
* His mother is Arlene Holmes. She told media: “You have the right person. I need to call the police . . . I need to fly to Colorado.” She lives in San Diego with his father Robert.
* The first victim to be named was Jessica Ghawi, aka Jessica Redfield . She had derived a shooting spree in Toronto in June. She had written: “I was reminded that we don’t know when or where our time on Earth will end. When or where we will breathe our last breath.”
* The Daily Mail, ever the one to make bad thing worse, says UK cinemas broadcasting the Batman film are on high alert.
What about the politics?
Poynter: During live coverage of the Aurora, Colo., theater shooting Friday morning, ABC News’ Brian Ross suggested the shooter, Jim Holmes, may be affiliated with the Colorado Tea Party.
Mail: As speculation mounts about the motive behind the mass shooting, one private investigator has said that Holmes may have been part of Occupy Wall Street’s most violent faction, Occupy Black Bloc.
Instapundit: “What’s pathetic is that every time, they so clearly want to blame tragedies like this on the Tea Party. I don’t generally like these calls for firings, and Ross was no doubt just reading what a producer sent him, but … They know how to be exquisitely sensitive and non-prejudgey when it might be a Muslim or some other protected minority, so maybe the only way to encourage them to show better judgment the rest of the time is to cost some people their jobs. Who was the producer? Meanwhile, I look forward to the libel suit.”
The Film
Daily Mail: ”WAS DEADLY SHOOTING INSPIRED BY BATMAN COMIC BOOK?”
The Dark Knight cinema massacre may have been inspired by a Batman comic book strip, it emerged on Friday. The bloodbath is a chilling copycat of a 25-year-old Batman comic strip which features a deranged gunman opening fire in a cinema. In the second issue of The Dark Knight Returns, written by Frank Miller – the creative mind behind Sin City and 300 – gunman Arnold Crimp opens fire in a pornographic theatre, killing three people, after listening to Led Zepplin’s classic track ‘Stairway to Heaven.’…
The comic itself is still in print, and on Friday it was available in several Waterstones’ book shops, priced £12.99.
July 28th, 2012 at 9:51 pm
Actually, He cleared NICS background checks when he purchased the weapons. No licenses were required for the rifle, shotgun, and 2 pistols. The incendiary devices is another matter.
July 22nd, 2012 at 9:19 am
Lisa: Ok, you win on the invasion but I think that was a diplomatic answer in the spirit of camaraderie and that logistics – length of supply lines and the sheer size of the US had more to do with it.
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I held a valid Australian firearm permit for over 30 years, so I am well aware the individual is the key. I didn’t call for outlawing guns – hence my last three paragraphs.
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Firearms ARE way to easy to acquire in the US, though, and there is absolutely no valid excuse or reason for members of the public to be able to acquire or possess military style assault rifles. They outlawed all semi-automatic type weapons after a massacre in Tasmania, Australia in the 90′s, and there hasn’t been a massacre since. In Colorado the weapons were all legal and one was a military style assault rifle.
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As I tried to allude previously, I think in the US the biggest problem is the glorification of gun ownership and use and the gun porn movies Hollywood churns out. No offense, but a country where a high school teacher can lose her job because she was once in the porn industry while people can happily buy assault rifles, seems to have a rather twisted set of moral/ethical priorities.
July 21st, 2012 at 7:44 pm
REMOVE THIS ARTICLE~ THIS IS FALSE!
July 21st, 2012 at 5:57 pm
Cheryl,
That’s exactly my point…..the only people who followed the “NO GUNS” rule were the law abiding citizens, the criminal/killer had no trouble getting around the law. That is what would happen if there were more laws against legal gun ownership, plain and simple. The people who don’t want to use guns to hurt anyone were completely at the mercy of the man who ignored the law. Killers will always find a way to kill – taking guns away from people who follow the law only makes killing easier for them.
Like this….
If only she’d had her gun.
PHILADELPHIA _ Suzanna Gratia is convinced she could have saved her parents’ lives when a madman named George Hennard crashed into a Texas cafeteria in 1991 and slaughtered them and 21 others before putting a bullet into his own head.
But she left the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver in her car that afternoon because of a Texas law against carrying concealed weapons.
Yesterday, in compelling testimony before a statewide panel investigating gun laws, Gratia vowed that was the last time she would go anywhere without her gun.
“It’s not going to happen to me again,” she said afterwards.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-15811890.html
That is what will happen if you disarm law abiding citizens. Criminals don’t follow the laws, and they will always find a way to kill if they want to.
July 21st, 2012 at 5:45 pm
Real stig, it’s not exactly “poppycock” — Some people may dispute the truth of this, but I believe it…..
While digging around online, I discovered another Web poster’s remark to the effect that he’d found in Christian News (a Lutheran journal published in New Haven, Missouri) published on 4 February 2002 the following:
In 1960, Robert Menard was a commander aboard the USS Constellation when he was part of a meeting between United States Navy personnel and their counterparts in the Japanese Defense Forces.
Fifteen years had passed since VJ Day, most of those at the meeting were WWII veterans, and men who had fought each other to the death at sea were now comrades in battle who could confide in each other.
Someone at the table asked a Japanese admiral why, with the Pacific Fleet devastated at Pearl Harbor and the mainland U.S. forces in what Japan had to know was a pathetic state of unreadiness, Japan had not simply invaded the West Coast.
Commander Menard would never forget the crafty look on the Japanese commander’s face as he frankly answered the question.
‘You are right,’ he told the Americans. ‘We did indeed know much about your preparedness. We knew that probably every second home in your country contained firearms. We knew that your country actually had state championships for private citizens shooting military rifles. We were not fools to set foot in such quicksand.’
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Isoroku_Yamamoto
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More massacres haven’t been stopped because no citizens were armed, other than the shooters. Here is what happened in Israel when they allowed teachers to carry guns in schools, to stop the PLO from targeting them…… http://old.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel200409022215.asp
Crying for outlawing guns in the wake of gun crimes is like saying we should outlaw cars because drunk drivers kill people. Why isn’t alcohol illegal?? Alcohol causes more misery and death than illegal drugs — why isn’t anyone crying for it to be against the law to drink???
There are millions and millions of gun owners in the US (and I am NOT one of them, by the way), and most gun deaths are caused from ILLEGALLY acquired guns….so how are laws against LEGAL gun owners going to stop that??? I’ll tell you — THEY WON’T. It’s the killer BEHIND the gun that is the danger – if he couldn’t get a gun, he would have made bombs or arrows or whatever he could find to kill…..how many things should we outlaw??
July 21st, 2012 at 3:11 pm
George, more guns are not needed. There was panic and chaos there and if some people had been carrying guns and started shooting at him more people may have been accidentally shot. He had a bullet proof vest on and it would have taken a direct shot to his forehead to take him out.
Lisa, he went in through the backdoor of the theater with his weapons so he wouldn’t be seen.
July 21st, 2012 at 2:06 pm
“Mitt Romney added, oddly: “I stand before you not as a man running for office, but as a father, grandfather, husband and an American.” How politicians like to use the phrase “…as a dad”, as if being a parent gives you a unique looks at mass murder. Holms has no children.”
Seriously? He was saying that he is all of those things, so he sees how terrible this incident was from all of those perspectives. As a single sentence, I thought it actually had great pathos, if you don’t completely misinterpret his meaning.
July 21st, 2012 at 10:45 am
Lisa: What a load of poppycock. The Japanese didn’t invade the US because it was logistically an impossible proposition. The Swiss have guns at home too, but the reason Switzerland hasn’t been invaded is that it is a geographically impossible proposition, not because the populace is armed. Australia wasn’t invaded in WW2 by the japanese either, and it’s population wasn’t armed to the teeth. Same reason, logistically rather difficult.
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How many massacres in the US have been stopped short by a normal citizen who happened to be armed? But you might be right, in a country full of armed people, someone in the theatre might have been able to stop him. However, that someone might also have been a nut-job and killed a few people for rustling their crisp packets.
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Your gun laws do not keep you safer. I live in Ireland. Homicide figures involving firearms for 1994 show that 0.62 people per 100,000 of population were killed with a gun. In the US it was 5.7, which means you are roughly 920% more likely to be murdered with a gun than I am.
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http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvinco.html
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In some ways the old saw about people, not guns, killing people is true. If you look at those statistics via that link, you can see that many other countries have high rates of gun ownership as well without the very high homicide rate by gun. Look at Norway: 32% of households with guns vs 39% in the US – but with a gun homicide rate only 17% of that in the US!!!!!
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Are you all mad? I don’t think so. So what’s the big difference? Norway doesn’t have Hollywood and a culture that glorifies gun use.
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Keep your guns – change how think about them.
July 21st, 2012 at 10:38 am
We knew the media rush to blame the TEA Party was coming. The media has sought to portray them as extremist and violent when they are clearly peaceful and pretty much representative of mainstream America. Been to TEA Parties. It’s like a family reunion environment.
I immediately suspected an Occupy link – and fervently posted that claim with little evidence. Occupy has openly called for violence. The media tends to encourage them and downplay or ignore their offenses. Been to Occupy. Occupy is a bunch of punks with little respect for anything including themselves. People who aren’t blinded by the media spin have known this was inevitable – and likely planned.
So this 24 year old Med School student joins Occupy and his grades start to slip. His college dream begins to slip away and Occupy fuels his rage. Failure isn’t HIS fault – it is this unfair society controlled by the RICH that is to blame. The media has assured him of this. He is unemployed yet bought 6,000 rounds of ammo, 4 guns, body armor and other equipment. He also learned to booby trap his apartment. All by himself.
RIGHT! This is NOT over. He was backed by somebody. Not alleging a government mind control operation involving ‘neuroscience’ as some websites suggest – but he sure appears to have had some help from somebody.
July 21st, 2012 at 8:42 am
Wait — the theater was a “Gun Free Zone” so that people would be safe from dangerous guns there…..well, then how in the world did a man with a gun get in??? Oh, right — CRIMINALS who want to kill, DON’T OBEY THE LAWS!!!!! So all the gun-control laws you could pass wouldn’t keep law abiding people safe from criminals and killers. As a matter of fact, if just ONE person had been carrying their gun in there, the massacre could have been stopped before so many people were shot. Ridicule that all you want, but it’s TRUE. And do you realize that one of the major things that stopped the Japanese from invading our west coast in WWII was the fact that so many Americans had guns – they were hesitant to attack us! Like Samuel L. Jackson said, when the guys with guns show up, I don’t want to be the one without a gun. Face it…our gun laws keep us SAFE more often than put us in danger. At least that’s what I believe. And how I vote.
July 21st, 2012 at 8:26 am
6000 rounds of ammo.
July 21st, 2012 at 5:39 am
More guns are needed so next time this happens it will be him with 100 bullets in his chest instead of the other way around.
July 21st, 2012 at 2:22 am
He bought all those guns legally within a six month period; so one could reasonably assume he had a massacre planned in advance. He even had a bullet proof vest on.
What puzzles me is his mother’s remark “you have the right person, I need to call the police….” What in god’s name did she know about her son – that he was insane and dangerous and had he said something to her re wanting to kill people in the past?
The authorities have still been unable to enter his apartment and from the reports (and have been showing them live on TV looking in the windows of his apt.) it sounds like it is booby trapped; as he warned them it was.
Sure more guns are needed, Real Sting! I can’t wait to hear the NRA come out with their usual statement – guns don’t kill, people kill! Our gun laws will never be changed no matter how many massacres take place. The NRA has the mega millions and the votes and few elected officials are going to give that up.
By the way, it was just announced he bought all his ammunition (over 3,000 rounds) ordered off the internet!
July 21st, 2012 at 12:36 am
More guns are needed, yea, more guns!