There are a ton of stories out there all on different media sources, all covering the same incident at different angles. Some cover the story from the victim's point of view, some cover the story from an outsider's point of view and some even cover the story from the shooter's point of view. There are so many different stories about the shooting one cannot possibly read or watch them all. We all know the general gist of the what happened and the shooter has been caught. Yes, I am calling him the shooter because I do not want to mention this douche's name, he doesn't deserve the recognition.
One trend I am seeing with a lot of these stories is the media and non-media now calling the it the "Batman Massacre" or the "Batman Shooting". I knew that was going to happen when I woke up in the morning and heard the news on the radio. At that point it was still the "Aurora Shooting" or something similar and had nothing to do with Batman. And that is my point, it has nothing to do with Batman. Bruce Wayne didn't enter the theater and open fire, his alter ego didn't swoop in and kill these people, even the villain Bane didn't murder and harm these people. They are fictitious characters.
The nickname "Batman Shooting" caught on like wildfire and soon there were hundreds of Photoshoped images of Batman crying for the victims, new black support ribbons and even a post that went viral demanding Christian Bale dress up as Batman and visit the victims in the hospital. All of these things are great gestures and are good for moral but people need to realize one thing. People cannot blame the movie, comic books, video games or even the novels. There is only one person to blame and that is the piece of shit who pulled the trigger.
This has been a disturbing trend for a while now, people trying to find other things to blame for someone's actions. "Oh he stabbed that person because he watched Friday the 13th" or "She sucked so many dicks because of Debbie Does Dallas.". No, no, fucking no. You can only blame the person who did the action. When a movie is made, I'm sure the director and producer did not sit there and say, "Gosh, I hope we make a bazillion dollars AND we cause someone to go on a rampage."
Granted things have changed since I was a youth and the movies, TV shows and video games have become more graphic and more realistic, but chances are the person who decides to go hunt zombies and accidentally kills a person, was probably tapped in the head to begin with, the zombie movie didn't mysteriously do it.
Growing up I watched cartoons, lots of cartoons. What kid didn't watch cartoons on a Saturday morning in the 80's? I watched cartoons like He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Voltron, Transformers, G.I. Joe and even Thundercats. I pretended to be characters from the cartoons, in fact when I would go over a friend's house after school we would play Transformers and we got to choose five Autobots we could turn into. We always chose the good guys. Sure we built play guns and swords out of Construx and pretended to fight the Decepticons, Cobra, and Shredder but not once did we say, let's go kill someone in real life.
I read X-Men comic books, I never thought to myself that I should go and cleanse the world of non superior beings. Did I make a Wolverine claw out of an old work glove and three of my mom's knitting needles? Sure I did, but never went berserker on anyone with it. I grew up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they were created in the area I lived, I've met the creators, read the comics, watched the cartoon and movies. I made a set of nunchucks and took an old broom stick and pretended to be Michalangelo and Donatello but the only victims where some trees and their branches, they suffered the ninja experience.
I watched Star Wars, the old Batman movies, Rambo and even the classic Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. Again, not once, did I think to myself, let me go and get a giant knife and gut my parents or my school mates. I never wanted to dump poison into the town's drinking water supply or did I ever have an inclination to pull a blaster out and shoot an alien. My parents let me have cap guns and play swords, I didn't turn out to be mass murderer and none of my friends did either.
I grew up with video games, granted not as graphic as they are now, but we had Mortal Combat, Contra and Mike Tyson's Punchout. Again, playing these never made me go bat shit crazy.
I don't know, maybe I'm off the mark on this one and I'm sure many people will dispute and argue with me until they are blue in the face but I feel that the problem isn't in the video games, movies, comic books and TV shows. The problem stands at a different level. What level it is, I don't know. I probably will never know but one thing I do know is before you go looking for something to pass the blame on, take a good hard look in the mirror. People are responsible for their own actions. This isn't just the nut jobs who are shooting up movie theaters, killing multiple victims or raping someone, this is also the people raising the nut jobs.
There I said it, if you bring a kid into this world, don't fuck them up. Be a parent, do your job and show them the difference between Autobots and Decepticons, G.I. Joe and Cobra, Thor and Loki, good and evil. Educate them about right and wrong.
