Aurora

Aurora,Colorado is a nice place....In fact it's beautiful....The reason I know is because I've been there.  I was stationed there at the now closed ,Lowry Air Force Base , right after I left basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San-Antonio...I used to tell everybody that I was in Denver...because I figured nobody had ever heard of Aurora...but the base was actually in Aurora..a beautiful little suburban community that was just a ten minute bus ride from the city of Denver.

When I had liberty,I'd often take the bus ,right at the gate of the base to the Aurora shopping malls and bars and movie theatres...I loved it there...Once I got used to the thin air...You know because of the high elevation...I didn't want to leave.....That's how much I liked it there!  I was considering becoming a transplant..For a minute.

Hadn't thought about Aurora or Denver for years until I read about the horrific tragedy that occurred there Friday at midnight during the showing of  the new Batman movie..."The Dark Knight Rises" which I was also planning to see this weekend.

A sick and demented graduate student's attack in a sold-out theater near Denver showing the new Batman movie, in which 12 people were killed early Friday, was the culmination of two months of meticulous planning that included a potentially deadly booby trap left in the suspect's home for investigators, authorities said.

 Fifty-eight other people were injured, many of them seriously, in the shootings shortly after midnight at the Century 16 Movie Theaters complex in Aurora, Colo. Earlier reports had said 59 people were injured, but police revised that number at a news conference Friday night.

All but a small handful of the injured had been shot, Police Chief Dan Oates said Thirty people remained in area hospitals Friday night, 11 of them in critical condition, after a carefully orchestrated attack in which the suspect, identified as James Eagan Holmes, 24, bought all of his weapons and ammunition legally beginning in May.

 Late Friday, the family of Alex Sullivan, 27, said in a statement that he was among the dead, the Denver Post and The Associated Press reported. Heart-wrenching photographs taken earlier Friday showed Sullivan's father, Tom, grieving and pleading for information about his son. Federal and local enforcement officials said James Holmes was sheathed in a helmet, a gas mask, a tactical bulletproof vest, throat and groin protectors and tactical gloves. All of the gear was black. Holmes was armed with two .40-caliber Glock handguns, a Remington 870 single-barrel pump shotgun, a Smith & Wesson AR-15 assault-style rifle and as many as 6,000 rounds of ammunition, Oates said. The scene also appeared to have been specially targeted for maximum carnage — the local premiere of one of the most eagerly awaited movies of the year, "The Dark Knight Rises," the third in the series of director Christopher Nolan's Batman films.

This vision had to be more horrifying to the crowds than anything going on in the movie... A lot of the patrons thought that when James Holmes appeared in the exit door  and tossed tear gas cannisters up into the air that this was a publicity stunt to hype the movie....It wasn't until they actually smelled the burning tear gas that they realized that something was horribly wrong....by then, it was too late...This fool opened fire on the hapless movie goers with about three different weapons, a glock, a shotgun and an assault rifle.

It seems as though this type of thing happens a little too often for my tastes...We had Columbine, which was in a community not too far from this....Then we had The Virginia Tech killings and the Fort Hood Massacre and now this....The worst mass shooting in U.S. History..  I'm no psychiatrist or TV pundit....and believe me , they are all over the news trying to figure out this kid's motivation...but I'm going to take a gander that yes...He ,James Holmes is obviously crazy.....(I know it's not politically correct to say so) but that I think due to the media's sensationalism of the other mass shootings...He was out to make a name for himself by topping the body counts of all the others....

So where will all of this madness end?  I don't know....He bought the guns legally and months apart...He would have passed any background test...He had no criminal record...Hell, He was, from what I hear an outstanding student back in his home state of California....and a Phd candidate who had been asked to withdraw from the program for reasons unknown.

He was also a classic "loner", not too sociable....Didn't have a girlfriend or many friends period....Hard to tell what's on a person like that's mind.....

Clearly , you can't politicize this....you can't pass a bunch of laws to stop this...You see he slipped through every law....This can't be legislated or controlled...This is something that deals with the American Psyche, the dark night of the American soul...which makes it even more horrific!