A Dark Night in Aurora, A Dark Day for America
Article written by Tom Magstadt Nation of Change OP-ED
The basic outlines of the “dark knight” massacre in Aurora, Colorado, are now well known. A 24-year-old medical school dropout named James Egan Holmes acting alone opened fire with an assault rifle in a crowded theater, killing 12 people and wounding 59.
A lot of good the Department of Homeland Security did in Aurora that night as “The Dark Knight” was emerging from his booby-trapped spider hole. There’s plenty of obvious irony in the subtitle of that damned movie: “The Dark Knight Rises.” Irony is one thing; tragedy leaves an altogether different taste in one’s mouth. A bitter taste like poison-laced lemon peels.
Living in Colorado, when I heard the first news stories on the BBC within minutes of the shootings, I thought of a high school, another massacre, and a lone shooter. Columbine. So, of course, did people all over the world from Copenhagen to Cairo, from Toronto to Tokyo. The Columbine horror happened only about a dozen years ago; it’s the kind of thing that remains lodged in the world’s collective memory for a long, long time.
Aurora and Columbine are within shouting distance of each other, less than 20 miles apart as the crow flies. That’s too close for comfort, but in fact these two crimes are obviously a lot closer from a sociological perspective. Google Maps is a great tool but it has nothing to say about pathological killers, or about a society that defines terrorism in a way that excludes the terrorist next door.
Any mass murderer – from Adolf Hitler to Osama bin Laden – is a deranged individual, of course. The fact is there are LOTS of deranged individuals among us, lots of nut cases. What was once abnormal behavior can (has?) become the new normal. Who really knows what’s normal, anyway? And who decides? Calling a mass murderer deranged doesn’t prove or solve anything.
The central tragedy in this tapestry of tragedies is not about the wasted life of a young man with a bright future nor about the senseless death of a dozen innocent people (including Veronica Moser, aged six) who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but rather in the fact that there was a federal law on the books banning the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic weapons. The law, the Assault Weapons Ban (AWB,) – aka the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act – was passed in 1994.The Assault Weapons Ban act was inadequate because it did not apply to assault weapons manufactured before 1994 and because it contained an expiration date (a decade). But it was a step in the right direction and provided time for the public and Congress to “get religion” and tighten the provisions of this half-good law. At least that was the hope. Cont. reading at Nation of Change
Read the full Article at Nation of Change website
About Tom Magstadt
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Tom Magstadt has published five books including Understanding Politics: Ideas, Institutions, and Issues,10th ed., (Wadsworth, 2013) and Nations and Governments: Comparative Politics in Regional Perspective , 6th ed. (Wadsworth, 2011), and An Empire If You Can Keep It: Power and Principle in American Foreign Policy (CQ Press, 2004). He holds a doctorate from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. His website is at www.worldviewwest.com and he blogs at opensalon.com.
