Here we go again. In our outrage over the Aurora massacre, we slip back into our habit of trying to make sense of the senseless, to trace a chain of causation back to its source, and eliminate that source so it will never happen again.
This fallacy reached its peak of absurdity after the Tucson massacre, when we as a society decided to stop using violent metaphors for about 10 minutes, because we all know Jared Lee Loughner wouldn’t have gone wacko if people didn’t say things like “let’s target” a congressional district. Then we saw Loughner’s loony picture, and all discussion about whether he was nuts ended.
Unfortunately, Columbine/Virginia Tech/Fort Hood/Tucson/Aurora will happen again, and again, because not every problem has a solution.
Immediately after the movie theater shooting early Friday morning, the national knee-jerk took over Twitter as we searched for someone to blame besides the one person responsible. Maybe it was the NRA. Maybe it was a culture of violence. Maybe it was movies like “The Dark Knight” that make villains seem cool.
The official Twitter feed of the National Rifle Association began the day, hours after the shooting, with a sunny, “Good morning, shooters. Happy Friday! Weekend plans?” The reaction proved only that people who hate the NRA continue to hate the NRA. But not checking the news before tweeting, or setting up an innocuous tweet to run in advance, is nothing to be outraged about.
Still, wouldn’t gun control have saved all those lives? Here we get back to Charlton Heston vs. Michael Moore. Heston told Moore, in “Bowling for Columbine,” that he backed guns because it was his Second Amendment right. Moore did everything to Heston but rebut that point.
It’s fair to debate whether the Second Amendment is a good idea, but doing so is purely an exercise in abstraction. There’s no debating that it’s there, and it’s there to stay. When 2004 John Kerry feels obliged to dress up like Elmer Fudd and go wabbit hunting for the cameras and 2008 Barack Obama feels obliged to tell Virginians, “I will not take your rifle away. I will not take your handgun away . . . it just ain’t true,” the possibility of repealing the Second Amendment stands at zero. You can’t blame the NRA for being fans of the Second Amendment any more than you can blame reporters for being fans of the First.
If Colorado wants to tighten its gun laws, the Second Amendment phrase “well-regulated” allows them to do so, but if it continues to be a gun-happy state, it must think the benefits of its laws outweigh the costs. If you don’t like loose gun laws, move to (or stay in) New York or Massachusetts.
What about Hollywood? After Ray Kelly said the gunman at the screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” claimed to be the Joker and had painted his hair red, it seemed possible that the killer is the kind of guy who watched Michael Caine’s “some men just want to watch the world burn” speech in “The Dark Knight” and thought: “My idol!”
“Bonnie and Clyde” is often tagged as the turning point when Hollywood began to turn depraved killers into heroes — cheered along by jaunty banjo music — but even during the 30 years when Hollywood meekly submitted all of its films to the Hays Office for rigorous censoring of the unseemly or the un-American, its villains were still pretty cool. What psycho didn’t thrill to the idea of going out James Cagney-style with a maniacal laugh and a giant explosion in 1949’s “White Heat”?
Blaming Hollywood for being irresponsible about violence makes no sense unless you’re prepared to argue for much more stringent censorship than movies faced in the era when married couples were shown sleeping in twin beds. And the chance of going back to that also is zero.
Anyway, “The Dark Knight Rises” is no more to blame for James Holmes than “Taxi Driver” is to blame for John Hinckley or “The Catcher in the Rye” is to blame for Mark David Chapman, and our efforts to comprehend these real-life villains will fail.
Lunatics may have their reasons, but those reasons make no sense. Madness has no logic. Insanity is the break in the chain of causation.
Want to prevent the next Aurora? Figure out a way to stop anyone from ever going nuts.