I’ve been abiding by the “today-is-not-a-day-for-politics’ creed because I want to show a proper respect for the dead and injured and not try to enlist them to win any preexisting political argument. That’s how I roll; your mileage may differ. In any case, I have never used this blog to argue for gun control or to write about gun issues. Today is not the day I am going to start.
It has probably been mentioned elsewhere and I would probably already have written about it if I were more of a movie buff, but I think last night’s crime was completely inspired by the original The Dark Knight movie and I think it might be prudent for the police to familiarize themselves with the plot.
I believe that The Joker uses a gas grenade in his first scene in The Dark Knight. That is how the shooter introduced himself in the theater. The Joker also arranges to have himself arrested so he can be interrogated by Batman. Under interrogation, he reveals to Batman the locations of two of his friends but indicates that he will only have time to save one of them. They are both hooked up to complex incendiary devices on timers. I believe the shooter attempted to do something similar last night. He had his stereo hooked up to turn on by timer at midnight. It was extremely loud, and he knew that it would lead someone to call the non-emergency number to complain, which would lead some police to be dispatched to his apartment, which was booby trapped. When the police found him in back of the movie theater, he offered no resistance but revealed that his apartment was booby-trapped. He may have hoped that the police would be too late to save the respondents, or would find themselves in a race against time to save them.
One final thing to consider is that the shooter may have thought this out one step further. I think it is unlikely that he could pull it off because he is not, in fact, The Joker, but The Joker had a plan to escape from prison. In fact, getting arrested was crucial to his overall plan. But since this guy doesn’t seem to have had many friends, we’ve probably seen the extent of his capabilities.
Still, I may be wrong about his plan for his apartment. It could be rigged in such a way that it can be detonated by sensors or remotely by cell phone or on a timer that is still ticking.
The guy clearly watched The Dark Knight a billion times and decided he wanted to actually be The Joker. What better time to initiate his plan than at the premiere of the sequel?
Given the level of sophistication of his plan and the fact that he is a neuroscience doctorate candidate, and therefore obviously quite bright, I would watch The Dark Knight very carefully, and perhaps all the other Batman movies, and I would not underestimate him.
His apartment could blow up at any time. And it’s not impossible that he still has something up his sleeve.
I heard one report that he bought a ticket and then stepped out the emergency exit when his cell phone rang. He is sophisticated enough to have had his home computer place that call at an established time, but it’s also possible that he has an accomplice.
The guy wanted to be The Joker. He may have been inspired by this part of the movie:
The next day, [Bruce] Wayne tries to figure out what the Joker is after. Alfred relates a story of when he was in Burma with friends attempting to nullify the local criminals by bribing them with jewels. One thief however, tossed these bribes away and continued to raid the local convoys. When Bruce seems confused over this behavior Alfred informs him that some men can’t be reasoned with, they don’t want anything in particular, that they kill for sport. Alfred observes that they just want to watch the world burn, as Bruce fixates on the Joker’s face on a monitor.
This guy may have no real motivation beyond emulating that moral indifference.
Booman, your previous post about the young woman who had already faced death just a month ago has haunted me since I read it. I was at work when this story broke and have tried to keep the news at a minimum because the sensationalism in stories like this is more than I can bear.
What I hate about these shootings, aside from the horrible loss of life and the suffering of the victims’ families and friends, is the gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair by everyone else. The news media glories in it; this is their “if it bleeds, it’s leads” dream come true.
But for the next weeks, all we’ll hear is, “How did this happen? How can we prevent this nightmare from ever happening again?” And this makes me crazy.
Because we can’t. We haven’t yet, and we won’t. Guns are out there for anyone to get, people who shouldn’t have them DO have them, and we cannot know the minds of anyone else in our world. There’s no way to enforce gun laws and the gun lovers will continue to push to have the existing laws stripped to next to nothing.
So along with the overwhelming sadness I feel for those who were killed and the breathtaking pain I feel for the families, I feel frustrated and angry. We can stop pretending that we can keep it from happening again at any time. It will happen again and again, and every time we’ll cry and talk about what to do.
And nothing gets done. Nothing can be done.
I agree with that to a point.
It’s not easy to make laws that account for Crazy. Norway suffered a much more devastating attack recently, and their approach to guns and ours have no resemblance to each other.
I’ve seen a lot of very predictable response on both the left and the right, neither of which is sensible in my opinion.
When we discuss this case, we shouldn’t just focus on the weapons and their lethality. We should also look at his armor and all the crap he’s assembled in his apartment. There are ways we can prevent people from doing the shit this guy has done that even the NRA can agree with.
But, no, we can’t totally prevent things like this from happening unless we want to really give the government much more power than even I am comfortable giving them. And, in any case, the political will is not there.
This may turn out not to be a factor in this particular shooting, but I’d be surprised if we don’t learn that Holmes was on antidepressants or some other psychoactive prescription medication.
I realize that these meds can literally be lifesavers for people who need them, but we’re getting way too blasé in our embrace of their use. We throw them around almost casually–we even use them to diagnose disorders.
The newer stuff can have powerful negative effects on some people. Usually when this happens it ends in suicide, but we really don’t know all the potential roads it can lead a vulnerable psyche down.
In the eventual examination of causes and prevention, I hope this is weighed along with other factors like weapons and armor availability.
Untreated mental illness is a hell of a lot more dangerous than physician-prescribed medical treatments.
I’ll bet you’re wrong. I’ll bet he had an untreated psychiatric condition.
Not in the mood to make any bets here, just saying, I won’t be surprised in the least to discover that he had a history of psych meds.
Minor correction: The new Dark Knight movie is the third (and final) in the series, and Heath Ledger’s The Joker character and the plot elements Boo describes are in the second, not first, movie, which some friends and I (geek alert!) watched last weekend.
I don’t remember a gas grenade in the first scene of The Dark Knight, in which a crew of his robs a bank and he then dispatches all of his henchmen. But that could just be me.
The plot elements aren’t that similar, other than the chilling disregard for life. IIRC the Joker never targeted a mass crowd of people, and the two booby-trapped buildings were large empty warehouses with one person each tied up in each, not an occupied apartment building. The main resemblance is The Joker’s stated motivation, which is, simply, to create chaos.
Ledger’s portrayal of a chillingly sociopathic nihilist is very powerful. I could certainly see someone who already has, er, some issues identifying with it. Here in Seattle, the cops have been exasperated by a loose collection of geek fantisists, impersonating their favorite superheroes, who’ve been running around in costumes for a couple of years now begging to get themselves killed while “fighting crime.”
If the movie tie-in is true, or even if the idea gains currency, expect the right wing chorus shift from a defensive “if only someone in the theater had been packing” line to an all-out culture war attack on liberal Hollywood and on the geek culture that has made such movies popular. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense coming from a political movement that glorifies violence at every turn, but, so what?
Regardless, I sure wish tragedies like this weren’t instantly turned into “SEE, MY SIDE IS RIGHT!!!” ammunition by the people who shout loudest in our political discourse. I’m with Boo. Have some respect for the dead.
you ignore the ferries at the end.
And, in any case, I wasn’t talking about the first scene. I was talking about the first scene in which the Joker appears.
Whoops. You’re right about the ferries. My bad.
The joker is in that first scene, BTW. Just not until near the end of it.
He had some kind of mask on in the initial scene, right? Not the Joker look.
When Bruce seems confused over this behavior Alfred informs him that some men can’t be reasoned with, they don’t want anything in particular, that they kill for sport. Alfred observes that they just want to watch the world burn, as Bruce fixates on the Joker’s face on a monitor.
Doesn’t that also apply to the GOP and the elites … that they want the world to burn?
Not in this sense, no.
Dick Cheney didn’t want to actually be handed a rifle and sent to the battlefield.
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I still believe this guy has a mental health disorder. On the BBC a psychiatrist made a case for this in a very convincing way and I find similarities with two other shooting incidents. Highly intelligent but aware of his own mental disorder and therefore attracted to this field of study. That’s my take on this guy, his mother was aware of it. How is US society coping with mental health of its citizens?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."My mother the psych nurse pointed out that early-20s is a common time for the onset of paranoid schizophrenia.
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The two earlier cases I referenced, both shooters were indeed 24 years old. The 1966 shooter Whitman was an ex-Marine and 25 years of age. Only the Gifford shooter survived the incident.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Most of you do not understand this kid. I do because I have been exactly where he is.
He is a smart guy. He was told, from high school on, that he was the cream of the crop, the smartest guy in the room, and for most rooms, that was 100% true. Unfortunately, he went to the wrong room.
He apparently failed his writtens. In grad school, you take classes for 2 years. Then you take writtens, which are exams that clear you for the Ph.D. program. Once you pass the writtens, you get the Ph.D. unless you really fuck up. He didn’t pass his writtens, it appears, and he probably failed them badly.
Writtens are not a set exam. They are instead an example of academic thinking. In my case, I was asked ahead of time on the areas in which I wanted to be tested. I chose 2, the faculty chose 2.
You can have 3 results usually – 1) Unconditional pass for 20% of cases. If you pass unconditionally, you are one of the really smart ones, usually smarter than a lot of the faculty. 2) Conditional pass with rewrite: here you are more of a standard grad student, and this is about 50-60% of cases. 3) Fail, no rewrite.
Often there are 2 exams, one open book (specific topics), one closed (general knowledge of the area). You write both in your office, on the honor system. In my case, they mixed them up. Sometimes I wonder if they went a little easy on me due to the mixup. Whatever, it was 33 years ago at this point (an odd thought indeed).
So this guy failed his writtens. His life was over. He was in dispair, he had the guns, he made a horrible decision to do something terrible.
I understand completely, which does not mean that I approve or that he decided right. I simple understand completely.
One of the dirty little secrets about graduate education today is that it is part academic hazing, part guild reduction of competition, part meritocratic screening of “undesireables”, and a lot of binge-and-purge absorbing information in larger and larger quantities. Unlike the days when almost all graduate education was on full fellowship, today it is all on the student’s dime and a major profit center for universities. Fail your writtens and you have a mountain of student debt and zero job prospects (you are now “overeducated”). It takes most folks in this situation years to dig out an find a career path. In this economy it is almost hopeless. Add in a guy who apparently was not very social and you have someone with no support networks to help him through in a culture that is hyped up on individual responsibility.
All of that before asking what meds he might have been taking.
And academics are increasingly sadistic in not understanding the human consequences of charging someone for an education and not actually delivering anything but debt. And some are sadistically gleeful when the cut out people and “improve the quality and rigor of the field.”
In the US, “standards” have become the excuse for ruining millions of childrens’ lives already, and this sort of short-sighted meritocratic thinking pervades the education establishment. Chris Hayes’s The Twilight of the Elites documents the consequences of leaving decisions to those who make the cut.
dataguy, thanks for this perspective.
I haven’t waded through the useless reporting to get to the simple facts. Is it certain that he was a PhD candidate who failed the writtens? How long ago was that? Your implied timeline doesn’t quite ring true: he failed the exam, he was in despair, he had the guns. The news reports did say he was dropping out of school just before the shooting.
Seems to me the elaborate plan — the guns, ammo, costume, gas, booby traps at his apartment — preclude this being a sudden reaction to a traumatic event. So does the Batman copycatting that Boo noted. This suggests that he was psycho/whatever some time before his academic failure, unless that happened a long time ago. Either way, he was making theater in his own mind, perhaps unable to even distinguish what was real and what was not. Unfortunately his state of mind will be used by the silly pundits to bloviate about the evil of violent entertainment, as if he wouldn’t have found some other model to fulfill his perceived needs.
Dataguy, nice insights on the grad school grind. I was surprised to learn you’re a PhD — you clearly still know how to think.
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“…believe this guy has a mental health disorder”
Will the human race ever progress to the point of understanding that anyone who kills people for no reason (except I want to and I can) has a mental health disorder?
All of the “is he mentally ill” stuff is idiotic, truly. The crazy are ALWAYS there. There are more people today than ever, and that means that a small number are truly off the cliff.
The issue is NOT WHY. Why is unknowable, and I am a psychologist and have spent a lot of time in the schizophrenia field.
The issue is HOW. The answer is A FAST GUN, A HIGH-CAP MAGAZINE, and UNLIMITED AMMO.
You want to control massacres? Control those. NONE of those are covered by the 2nd Amendment.
NRA and gunsel trolls are filling all kinds of chat forums. DO NOT LISTEN TO THESE TROLLS. They are paid shills of the gun manufacturers, and are trying to get the usual NRA points out there – unlimited rights, genie out of the bottle, guns cannot be controlled.
All of these points are lies.
There are as many guns as people in the US. In that sense, the genie is out of the bottle unless you are going to do no-knock searches of every house and business in the US. A lot of those guns are registered, used by responsible owners for hunting and other sports, or for protection and not used at all ever. The rest are traded through unregulated gun shows, personal trades, or other aspects of the unregulated or illegal market that exists by arbitraging differences in gun regulations between jurisdiction. And some of foreign manufacture are smuggled into the country. The volume of transactions makes regulation and control a problem like regulation of selling cigarettes to minors.
In this case, guns were under control to the extent that all of the weapons were purchased at licensed stores, they had records of this guy purchasing them and when, and there were no cues that these guns would wind up being used as they were. The high-capacity magazine would be an obvious thing to regulate, but banning it outright would force it into the illegal market–a deterrent only to folks who would consider that market icky.
And in this case, Colorado does have a conceal carry permitting system. So where were those brave heroes that the NRA always keeps talking about. They had the legal ability to conceal carry. Did the theater post a public prohibition of conceal carry? Were these brave heroes put off by just a public notice?
As a practical matter, the self-defense argument is bogus. We have had a traditional culture in the US that asserts that civilization is a matter or reining in violence. The gun culture that has arisen since Wayne LaPierre took over the NRA and used it as a front group for electing Republicans flies in the face of those traditional values. And the best they can use for evidence for their tradition is the minority of people who lived on the expanding frontier where there were no institutions of law. In the 1950s, the quintessential Western drama was of the sheriff who enforced the rule that “you don’t take your gun to town”. We have traditionally depended on government to establish order and protect safety.
This is just one more manifestation of the crisis in our political culture that prevents the solution of obvious problems.
You are correct to point out the futility of the attempt to be able to psychologically profile people likely to commit “senseless crimes”. The individualistic focus on crime prevention to the exclusion sociological and cultural issues has become a danger to the civil rights guaranteed in the Constitution. The idea that one can pre-emptively arrest a criminal on the point of committing a crime results in bad profiling and cases of false arrrest and entrapment. Those are inherently unconstitutional because no crime has been committed and none might actually be committed even without intervention. What dealing with cultural and sociological issues does is reduce the probability that these events will happen without the hubris that we can eliminate them entirely.
And part of the sociological and cultural change would be a diminishing of gun fetishism.
It’s not idiotic to take mental health and our approach to it in our culture as a factor deserving of attention and study. Loughner is probably the most recent obvious example of how our approach to mental health is woefully inadequate to our societal needs, but there are going to be plenty more examples in the coming years. We have a literal army of broken minds and brains out there returning from years living in hell to a home that shows little or no compassion or willingness to help.
I get that you have specialized experience and training, and your points about the ready availability of killing weapons and ammunition are going to get few arguments on this board, certainly not from me anyway. And I for damn sure share your sense of frustration. But seriously. It doesn’t make every other consideration stupid, and it doesn’t make everyone else an idiot for examining some of the less obvious elements that make up a horrific episode like this. Some of us can hold more than one causative factor in mind at a time–and if we have any sense we’ll take this opportunity to examine every possibility and avenue.
Our national sickness goes beyond the guns, although that is an issue in blaringly obvious need of addressing. We need to get serious about the entire disorder, not just the outward symptoms.
The reason why I say that it is stupid is that no one has the slightest idea how to predict “dangerousness” from persons who are mentally ill. In addition, the idea that identifying schizophrenics, for instance, as dangerous is mostly confused about schizophrenia. Schizophrenia VERY OCCASIONALLY manifests as a bunch of delusions. For most schizophrenics, it is a disease of confusion, of failure to fit in, of failing to bath. They are not dangerous as much as they simply confused or lost.
And I did not mean to come off as an expert. No one would hire me to testify in court about schizophrenia. It is something I have worked on, however, from the academic side exclusively.
I don’t know what all kinds of theories about mental disorders are floating around out there today in the wake of these shootings, but for my part, I was never urging a “predictive” model for heading off future schizophrenics, or any other disorders that could lead to violence.
I was simply pointing out that we rely too heavily on pharmaceutical treatments as 100% cure, to our own detriment, and to that of the patients involved.
And it is a fact and has been for perhaps decades that a common method for diagnosing psychiatric disorders is to prescribe various medications until the patient responds favorably. I have that firsthand from numerous individuals involved in psychiatric care at the nurse and doctor level. It strikes me–admittedly a total non-professional–as a somewhat haphazard approach, akin to Russian roulette, except that in this methodology you’re lucky when you find the loaded chamber. And the exposure to danger is exponentially higher.
I hope that clarifies my position. I feel like I understand what your original point was, although I don’t know if it was directed at any commentary you read on this forum, or if was in response to the reams of commentary on the web in various places this past day or so. I guess it doesn’t really matter. We all have noble intentions here.
Thanks for your clarification. The whole issue of the efficacy of medication is difficult. The actual mechanism that is used by the medications is to my belief not clear. I think that in many cases the medications have essentially a sedative effect, and thus improve by simply slowing things down. Many patients really don’t like the meds, for that reason, because they slow down thinking. My sister, schizophrenic for 30 years now, does not take meds and dislikes the entire idea – makes her seriously angry to even suggest it. She’s borderline schizophrenic at worst.
But, in conclusion, we do have good intentions on all sides here, I agree.
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“A FAST GUN, A HIGH-CAP MAGAZINE, and UNLIMITED AMMO”
I agree on most of your comments and contribution. However, read my link to the mall shooting spree in The Netherlands. The perpetrator had an history of mental illness and received excellent treatment from the Dutch Health Services. The Dutch have a very tight control on firearms (70,000 permits – pop. 16 million), you just don’t easily get your hands on a firearm, rifle or handgun. Such an act of violence has NEVER happened before in this country. A very similar story to the USA shooting sprees. In a mental state of paranoid schizophrenia apparently these intelligent persons make detailed plans and execute the plans with deadly precision. The do try to explain their deeds by leaving notes and messages behind.
This guy was the nephew of a top Army General Arie van der Vlis and managed to get a gun license. The incident has been thoroughly investigated from the psychiatric shortcomings to the failure in gun licensing. Everything is well documented in Dutch society, however the file on how he got his gun license has gone missing!
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Another interesting question:
Since he dropped out of his doctorate program, he may have used his tuition money.
i.e. student loans?
Probably, although it could be family money or grant money. Or it could be on a credit card.
Didn’t the VA Tech shooter buy his hardware on credit?
Mostly graduate students are on a stipend as a TA, RA, or other training program. I went to 4 years of graduate school, and it was all covered on stipends. I paid nothing out of pocket, or put another way, I was on an assistantship of some sort for the 4 years. After that, I was a consultant for various computer programs. So, I’m not shocked that he had money – I’d be shocked if he didn’t.
Law, medicine, dentistry, MBA – you pay for the program. Academic programs, you are usually on an stipend. At least in the past, don’t know about today.
How long ago was that? My experience was the same as yours. Today it is different unless you are deemed a “very talented person”. From the news reports, apparently he had a research (lab) assistantship for a while at least. But he was “on rotation” in labs, which could also mean that the researchers were getting free labor.
Back in the day, if you couldn’t get a fellowship or an assistantship, you generally didn’t go to graduate school. Today in some fields, a masters or PhD is required to make your Bachelors degree useful in getting a job. So more people are taking loans and paying their own way.
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“Somehow, the acclaimed student and quiet neighbor reached a point where he painted his hair red, called himself ‘The Joker’, the green-haired villain from the Batman movies.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Can it get any weirder?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."