Forum Post: Another Perspective on the Batman Theater Shooting
Posted 11 years ago on July 26, 2012, 4:13 p.m. EST by Misaki
(893)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
[Seeing what response if any this gets; originally posted here]
This topic has been mentioned before on this site. However, that explanation is insufficient to explain that kind of attack in the United States, which is often regarded as one of the most independent or 'selfish' cultures among the so-called developed countries.
One description of the shooting says that James Holmes (24) "methodically stalked the aisles of the theater, shooting people at random, as panicked movie-watchers in the packed auditorium tried to escape".
The best explanation is that he was trying to determine if the problems in U.S. culture are the result of maliciousness, or just stupidity. It seems that if he was trying to kill as many people as possible, there would have been more casualties. And yet it probably would have been easy for one or two determined people to, for example, attack him from behind and prevent any further injuries or deaths to other people in the theater.
The fact that no one did is significant, as is the lack of discussion of this aspect of the situation. There have been questions about whether "one person with a concealed weapon could have ended the attack", but James Holmes was wearing full body armor so it is questionable whether such retaliation would have been more effective than simple hand-to-hand combat.
What James Holmes and anyone who reads the account of the event should have concluded is that if the United States is a nation of 'selfish' people, who place priority on their own goals (survival) instead of the reasonable goals of other people (survival), the people using this strategy are not competent enough to prevent unwanted and unexpected alteration of their physical condition by other people.
Conversely, if the United States is a nation of selfless people who are only pretending to be selfish, no one had enough confidence in their abilities to attack the shooter and prevent further injuries or deaths. The conclusion is that when it comes to important things, people really are 'sheep' and it is necessary for people with authority to use that influence to accomplish goals that benefit society, even if there appears to be opposition or a lack of popular support for a specific policy.
The motivations in the 'selfless people' case might be a little more complicated; people in the theater might have wanted to avoid propagating the idea that attacking the shooter was the 'morally correct' thing to do, since it would have meant that anyone who didn't was unethical... but the implication is that 'appearing to act ethically' for one person is more important than 'staying alive' for another person.
That leads to situations like someone destroying their house and killing themselves rather than be evicted and their home taken by Freddie Mac, because of other people who don't want to 'unethically' support higher government spending and taxation to create jobs.
Another good example of the phenomenon is the apparent support for 'honor killings' by other women in the countries where that practice is used. A study showed that people with ambivalent feelings about a policy are often the strongest supporters of it in public to prove their 'sincerity'... but as James Holmes showed, this is one way to get yourself or other people killed.
If the above is true, that people feel that upholding the appearance of correct action for one or more people around them is more important than ensuring the survival of one or more other people, the only logical explanation for how people would feel this is justified is that the people in the first group are seen to be selfish, and would prefer being seen as ethical over other people remaining alive. This perception would explain many things, and it has already been shown how this conclusion might be reached from nothing more than mistakes arising from misjudgements in value—which in turn happens because of people who not aware of inaccuracies in the 'system' formed by common social standards of judgement.
Of course, as was remarked in a blog that was eventually lost from the Internets—even archive.org!—thinking is only useful to the extent that it leads to a useful result. If most people are sheep, or 'granite rocks on a mountainside', it means that few people have the confidence to redefine reality to the benefit of themselves and other people who are intelligent enough to express a consistent preference.
So much hogwash. Almost anyone in that same situation confronted with imminent fear of death, with people panicking all around and fleeing for their lives, may exhibit selfless acts as a matter of choice for loved ones, but the primary motivator for each person will most likely be survival.
I have personally been in fire situations, in which people were forced to evacuate large multi-story buildings. Most act as calmly as possible, considering the circumstances, but only a very few people are willing to rush back into a flaming structure to save strangers.
Maybe you would; maybe you wouldn't. Your choice might be dependent on the whole scenario, but no one, who was not involved and wasn't willing to rush into the flames him/herself has any right to make any judgement. And I seriously doubt that a person, who had the willingness to rush into flames to save strangers, would bother to pass judgement on those who didn't.
"When he arrived at work Friday morning -- just hours after a gunman killed 12 and injured 58 others at the Century Aurora 16 theater -- there already were 15 to 20 people waiting outside the store, Meyers said."
http://occupywallst.org/forum/colorado-massacre-and-the-media-lies-about-gun-con/
A fire cannot be incapacitated with just a few simple techniques that many people are physically able to do, nor does it become significantly easier for other people to rescue strangers trapped in a burning building after the first person has decided to do so.
Usually though, the focus is on fire prevention and the argument is that the attack was probably the result of people ignoring the problem of high unemployment.
He was not just armed with a small pistol. He had an automatic assault rifle and a shotgun. If he kept his back to the wall it would have been nearly impossible for people to get close to him without being blown away first.
Some accounts say that the shooter "methodically stalked the aisles of the theater". News accounts differ about this, and about whether the canisters that were thrown lead to symptoms of tear gas or were just smoke, but from what is publicly known some people at least would have had opportunities to attack the shooter—if only they chose to run towards him instead of out the exit.
More tripe. A person in imminent danger of losing his or her life will most often attempt to flee the danger, even if fleeing is irrational or counterproductive.
In a situation such as the theater shooting the crowd was totally unprepared for a well-armed, apparently well-trained gunman with multiple weapons to begin blasting away. The first instinct is survival, and most people would seek shelter or run.
If the author of the piece thinks otherwise, I want see him/her put his/her head into the mouth of the lion before judging others.
Fleeing was rational for someone who only cared about their own life or the lives of people they already knew. It was not rational for someone who cared about the lives of strangers.
Are you volunteering to be the shooter who is endangering the lives of other people?
Are you purposely being obtuse?
I never volunteered anything except my disdain for the post and anyone who places him/herself in a superior, judgmental position after the fact.
From your assumptions, am I to assume you're volunteering to charge a well-armed, armored subject, as he's firing a semi-automatic rifle, carrying a backup handgun and a shotgun? I don't believe so. Most people talk bravely until they face such a situation, and then there's no time for reasonably calculating. You react or act. War heroes, like Audie Murphy, rarely remember all the details of their acts. They simply jumped into action. They didn't calculate and reason as to what was a selfless or selfish act.
And neither are you criticizing people who ran away from a shooter who was facing the opposite direction. As pointed out in the OP, it is conceivable the shooter was motivated by the desire to see whether this moral standard would develop, or to allow others to observe whether it would.
Bullshit.
I hope you feel safe next time you visit the movie theater ^_^ After all, it's not like these attacks happen frequently.
I don't go to movie theaters. So that solves that problem, but lunatics seem almost ubiquitous. Take a look around the grocery store next time you're shopping.
The kind of lunatic who attacks a grocery store is probably not as intelligent, and therefore easier to deal with.
Unless it's the easily-understandable motivation of robbery, which as a type of crime is just another symptom of unemployment and inequality as has been well documented.
I certainly agree that a large number of violent, money-involved crimes are directly attributable to economic-political inequality.
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It appears that some are not familiar with the adrenaline response, more commonly known as flight or fight response. This is an automatic, chemical response our bodies make when presented with 'emergency' situations.
There is no conscious thought, it is instinctive. There are few individuals who can over come this instinctive reaction and make an informed choice whether to run or to fight, there are many individuals (police, armed forces etc) who have trained themselves and in some cases experienced the situation and were able to engage that training. It is difficult to overcome instinct.
Very few people have what some may describe as a 'emotional shut off valve', which merely means the ability to assess a situation and take proper actions to end the situation or conflict.
As I have stated several times, when presented with the scenario of 'one armed citizen' would have been able to change the outcome, I have to present this...
It is nice to believe one could be placed in a situation such as this and react with a cool, calm mind. To assess the events as they are unfolding and take proper, effective action. The likelihood of this scenario is very small.
After all, one party comes to the event with intention, the citizen did not. Carrying the situation and aligning it with known facts, we are presented with a semi darkened large room, with multiple people who are either unaware or in panic. There would be light flashing, further confusing the interpretation of people's actions (sit in a theater and try to see what someone is doing a few seats away, you can set this experiment up with a friend), add to the scenario smoke or tear gas (both will irritate the eyes and further confuse vision). Then there is the choke. Shooting a projectile with the possibility of killing another person is not as easy as the movies make it out to be. There is no choreography, no direction, no good outcome. Someone will not walk away. One may think they have 'the nerve' to do so, most would be surprised to discover that they would have to overcome a reluctance to do so.
Killing as a political statement is simply and excuse for killing. While there is an impact, it is unlikely to be the type of impact that would result in the type of political discourse and action desired.
The odds are this shooting is exactly what it appears to be. One person, mentally deranged acting out a violent fantasy.
Several members of the US military were in the audience. Though usually when, say, an "off-duty police officer" is involved with stopping a crime it's because they were carrying firearms of their own.~ Can't really blame any specific person for running away when everyone else was too, but it does allow us to observe the lack of discussion about this topic.
Very true, this was seen for example in the Gaza War: "An Israeli UAV airstrike on the police headquarters of Gaza City killed 40 people, including several dozen police cadets at their graduation ceremony." ... casualties on the Palestinian side included over 300 children while the Israeli side only lost 10 combatants, including 4 to friendly fire.
I'm sure it had nothing to do with the middle class opposing job creation for the poor and unemployed (who are poor precisely because they do not own land therefore many have to pay over half their income in rent).
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Works both ways. Were you there? No. Etc. And unless you are volunteering to be another gunman, you can't say whether another person would try to stop an attacker in that situation.
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That was very thorough. Thanks
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I'll humbly admit you are right.
You can call that heroism if you like. But the fact remains that most people who were able to did run away and out of the theater, and no one tried assaulting the shooter.
It seems very likely that many people were, and it has not been shown that no one was in that position, nor is it realistic to say that no one was. Wikipedia mentions "a canister emitting a gas or smoke" but even if it was tear gas, and enough that it wasn't dispersed to ineffective levels, it is still possible to function and attack someone while breathing tear gas. Many witness accounts do not even mention anything to suggest it wasn't just some kind of smoke... tear gas literally leads to tears and runny noses, not just "eye irritation".
Police officers are very aware that someone can very quickly close the distance to someone holding a gun and attack the person holding the gun. There is no need to wait for someone to reload, especially if they're facing the other direction. It sounds like you have minimal experience with violent crime.
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Why would a Muslim extremist care about anything that happened in the US? You have a strange conspiracy theory, although the part about Indonesia seems reasonable from what I've heard.
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You mean the kind of dogmatic adherence that everyone with a strong ideology, including self-identifying Democrats and Republicans in the US, displays..?
It's the libe(R)tarian ideology that has been doing the loins share of the real damage all over the World.
So what do you make of that, as they have a stronger influence among the (R)epeliant's and conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones.
Libertarians as a group are basically ineffective. Fixing unemployment would address many of the things they complain about, but they apparently are unwilling to support solutions that would do this. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/04/labor_market_regulation_freedom_and_property_rights_are_red_herrings.html
Why would they fix it, when they are busy extracting it?
Look beyond the cartoons they present for public consumption.
Because having more money is pretty pointless beyond a certain point.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204632204577128230588463516.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/here-is-the-full-inequality-speech-and-slideshow-that-was-too-hot-for-ted/257323/
They might still try to earn as much money as possible but the only real point is to compare against each other, and this is just as possible to do if the top 0.01% made only 1/10th of what they currently do compared to the average worker. The scale changes, but the relative people on it don't (unless they're doing something that sees lower demand ^.^)
I wouldn't know. I've never been anywhere near that point.
If what you say is true, then you must wonder why they keep some 32 trillion out of circulation.
I've linked to this so many times in the past day ;_; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/04/business/sales-of-luxury-goods-are-recovering-strongly.html
“If a designer shoe goes up from $800 to $860, who notices?” said Arnold Aronson, managing director of retail strategies at the consulting firm Kurt Salmon, and the former chairman and chief executive of Saks.
“This group is key because the top 5 percent of income earners accounts for about one-third of spending, and the top 20 percent accounts for close to 60 percent of spending,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “That was key to why we suffered such a bad recession — their spending fell very sharply.”
Part of the demand is also driven by the snob factor: at luxury stores, higher prices are often considered a mark of quality.
(So the point is) if the rich work less, we can basically instantly fix unemployment, and fewer people will buy luxury goods at their current prices so money will be diverted away from the rich, reducing inequality. http://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/ (pros and cons listed at the99vote)
You're skipping over the $32,000,000,000,000.
The actual amount of US dollars in circulation was only about $800 billion before the financial crisis, and even now after the "quantitative easing" is just like $2.5 trillion.
Regardless, it just proves the point: the rich can easily afford to keep spending the same amount even if they work less.
(If this causes the markets to crash and phantom wealth in the stock market to vanish they might stop buying $1000 shoes and watches, but well... people can just continue sharing the available jobs and no reason for unemployment to go up.)
The amount of money that they have stashed is estimated at 21 to 32 trillion.USD.
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If it was for research purposes, where is the lie?
See for example, Statistical argument for discarding the existing system
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Well, as I said in the first post on the topic, I didn't really expect the argument to lead to any results.
It is possible that argument DID lead to results, in the form of James Holmes making further preparations for that future attack, but it did not lead to people actively supporting the idea of working less.
What do you see as deceitful within that paragraph? That some people could have attacked him and prevented further deaths? Is James Holmes a superman who was invincible to attack from ordinary humans?
You know, in the middle ages a knight in full plate armor could be killed by a single footsoldier stabbing them in the throat or between gaps in their armor. There were weapons specifically designed for this. Not that James Holmes, or "the shooter" was wearing full plate armor.
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Someone 20 feet away, with a gun aimed at them could not have prevented being shot.
Someone 20 feet away, but on the other side of the shooter was not about to be shot, but could have prevented the first person from being shot by attacking the shooter.
Legally, however, they were not obligated to do this, and it seems that running away was socially acceptable as well. Your continued posts on this topic only serve to confirm this. Thank you, since while a thread with 0 replies does imply some level of feedback it is ambiguous—which, again, might have been the cause of the attack.
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good morning zen had to come up here to respond, first here's a youtube to make the morning get off to a good start, I bet you know this guy, he taught me so much...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chagwk0IyA0
and yours is why I haven't made one, it is easy to be misunderstood when speaking to those that are unprepared, still without the risk where would we be?
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Factsrfun is a paid political spinmeister (liar for hire) assigned here to co-opt OWS and perpetuate the two-party tyranny.
Learn more about his propaganda tactics here:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-15-rules-of-web-disruption/
This forum is for OWS Revolutionaries. Get the fuck out, Factsrfun!
Do you have a point or are you just mindlessly linking things that seem slightly relevant?
It shouldn't even be necessary for me to point out that crime rises with inequality. Do you want me to link to the book The Spirit Level, or the TED talk which talked about this?
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Debating a lunatic like ZenDog is a waste of time:
http://zendogblog.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuctdBycnSo
In the U.S., there were instances where people on an airplane took actions to wrestle with the so-called "Fate."
Once on 9/11/2001 in Pennsylvania so it was heard, "Let's roll!" That heroic action did not save the passengers and their airplane but proved that people's behaviors CAN change once they truly realize their actual situation.
Another time, people overpowered the Underwear Bomber around Christmas time. That prevented a major disaster. Yes, it proved that people CAN wrestle with the so-called "Fate" and win.
In both cases, people realized that they were ALL riding on this airplane together and it was going to crash and kill them all. Likewise, we will take actions when we realize that we are ALL riding on this spaceship Earth together and it will fry the inner parts of continents to force human habitation to their edges or if we do not fix our structural problem, we will be creating our own hell on Earth, financial or otherwise. It takes a change of perspective from 2D to 3+1D so that we no longer behave as Flatlanders by transcending our 2D limitation, first and foremost through our own minds.
Thank you. This is basically what we have been leading up to.
If anyone has been following along (and James Holmes might have been a reader of the site), I have always maintained that large-scale problems are not really the result of anyone being malicious—it is all just because of prejudices and assumptions, such as the assumption that someone else (political leaders, or maybe economists) is smart enough to think of a solution to our problems if one exists.
'Important' economists, etc. have not supported the specific solution described on that site and have not directly responded to comments or emails though there is general acknowledgement that working less could fix the economy.
http://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/2012/08/lazy.html
http://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/2012/07/recent-developments.html
Reading this discussion, I can't help but remember an incident which happened to me a couple years ago. The building I was working in having an occupancy of around 600 was notably shook by an earthquake. About twenty of us immediately left the building and assembled outside. Luckily the building did not come down, but while outside someone remarked to me " the scariest thing about this is not that there was an earthquake, or that the building shook as it did, but that there are still five hundred eighty something people inside still waiting to be told to get out."
It depends on the building. Modern buildings are constructed to be very resilient. For example, in the 2011 Touhoku earthquake "Japan's National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED) calculated a peak ground acceleration of 2.99 g (29.33 m/s²). The largest individual recording in Japan was 2.7g, in the Miyagi Prefecture, 75 km from the epicentre"... but most of the damage, including to the Fukushima nuclear power plants, was from the tsunami, not the earthquake.
Areas with older buildings or ones where standards are not enforced or not present are more vulnerable to earthquake damage, though.
But I think this thread is also relevant to what you said: http://occupywallst.org/forum/people-with-strong-ideologies-are-sheep/
I was an old building, and not one built to any earthquake codes.
Interesting thread. thanks.
James Holmes Conspiracy Documentary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk6OOvgjYdY&feature=player_embedded
Thank you, thankyou, thank you!!!
I'm former military, I've faced death. This fool could have been taken out by any relatively able bodied person unarmed! Some fool in a gas mask who's nearly blind, with a rifle (long thing to grab onto) running around a cramped area, is extremely vulnerable.
Thank you. While you don't comment on the explanation given for the shooter's possible motives, I think the fact that James Holmes warned the police about the explosives in his apartment also supports the line of thought in the first post.
This was originally posted on these forums partly to see if it would get anyone to sign a petition on the White House website for job creation, but I don't think it convinced anyone to do so and the petition has expired as of today.
I defy anyone without training to keep their wits about them with a.223 rifle going off repeatedly. A human being was not designed to handle sounds on the scale of a gunshot, our systems cannot process that easily. Its profoundly shocking. It instantly confuses and frightens most untrained people. Soldiers and police officers have undergone training, civilians have not.
Then the relevant part of the OP would be this:
http://wh.gov/cVNr
http://wh.gov/aJ6T
(for the sheep reference, see http://occupywallst.org/forum/people-with-strong-ideologies-are-sheep/)
Some people are saying that the La Amarja card from the Illuminati card game (1995) predicted the shooting.
To see the card, see the link below.
http://www.thetruthbehindthescenes.org/2012/07/26/illuminati-card-shows-aurora-colorado-shooting/
That says nothing about how to prevent such attacks from occurring in the future. If the attack was, in fact, motivated in part by the apparent apathy of the middle class towards the unemployment problem (which mostly affects people without college degrees, and even more so minorities like blacks/African Americans... a thread on this forum linked to a study where white felons had the same or better chance to be hired as blacks with no criminal history) then fixing unemployment in a way that doesn't create other problems will prevent this kind of attack.
I also thought about that and wondered why no one made an attempt to stop the perp. From what I understand, the AR jammed and for a brief moment he was trying to figure out what happened.
Being unable to clear it, he pulled out his pistol and started again.
Would there have been a situation where one or several people could have jumped him from behind - we don't know.
Whould there have been time enough to jump him when the AR jammed and he changed to the pistol - we don't know.
I think the distinguishing factor would be if all the exits were blocked and no one could escape. Then I think a different attitude towards the shooter would have taken place.
The airplane that was hijacked in PA was a prime example - although the people on board were up against 5 knife weilding killers they decided they needed to do something - regardless of the circumstances and knowing that they had no alternative.
In the Gabby Gifford shooting the gunman was taken down when he tried to reload - was this a different situation - possibly because the people who took him down may have been close to him and he wasn't aware of thier presence.
So it's hard to determine what a person or persons would do in a situation like this - a varity of circumstances are the determing factor - no one knows for sure how anyone will react in situations of stress.
Yes, they are all somewhat different situations. If you read accounts of the Norway attack, a group of 3 males tried counterattacking but they only had rocks or something, and after one of them was shot the others ran away. But at the same time a young boy who asked not to be shot, was not shot.
It is also possible that many people who would have attacked the shooter in that case were not the type to attend the premiere of the movie... but this is not as important because the first post was meant to show how the shooter could have been acting with "good intentions" given his knowledge of society. (See for example http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-traitors-within-us/)