Tag: shootings

Proximate disaster

A blizzard and several avalanches in the Himalayas in central Nepal are reported to have killed more than two dozen people

HimalayasWhen I read about wildfires in San Diego County, California, or flooding in Mecklenberg County (Charlotte), North Carolina, I contact the appropriate sister to check out if she’s being affected. Usually, the answer is no, though one year, a fire was uncomfortably close.

They do the same for me. Flash floods five miles from Albany made the national news, but the actual storm missed me.

I was thinking about this because my friend Karen, who I’ve only known since 1958, has been in Bhutan and Nepal. Cyclone HudHud created some landslides in Nepal. So when we heard that a blizzard and several avalanches in the Himalayas in central Nepal are reported to have killed more than two dozen people, her friends, including me, were concerned.

She explained on Facebook(!), where I purloined her picture, that, according to the local paper The Himalayan, “rescue missions are underway on Huinchili,” one of the mountains visible to her on the trek. Fortunately, she went no higher than 7000 feet; she did have to endure hiking uphill for six hours in “incessant raw rain.” But the snow was at much higher elevations, causing the avalanches.

Some guy in Albany riding a bike got shot, apparently in the head, at 9:40 a.m. on Thursday. I found this more than a little unsettling. When I started riding my bike to the choir that evening, I realized that I just didn’t want to be out; totally irrational, I know, but nevertheless true.

Mistakes were made in treating Ebola in the United States. The second nurse who got infected should not have been allowed to fly. I’d bet money, and I seldom do, that at least one of the two US nurses who got infected were exposed when they took off the protective suits.

But all the conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, that he, e.g., wanted the disease to come to the US to get back at white people shred both common sense and common decency.

Another day, another mass shooting

After President Reagan was nearly assassinated in March 1981, there was a “commonsense” limit on assault weapons, but that law lapsed nearly a decade ago.

When I first heard about the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, it wasn’t until about noon on Friday, December 14, a couple of hours after the horrific event. After lunch, I spent about three hours listening to the online reporting, first on NBC News, then ABC News. I figured if I kept following it, perhaps I’d discover they’d gotten it wrong. And they had – it wasn’t 18 dead children, it was 20. The wrong brother was initially named as the shooter. The basic framework, though, remained terribly the same.

Sometimes, when people don’t like a piece of entertainment, they’ll say, “I threw up a little in my mouth.” A crude reference, I think. But, following this story, I literally DID.

My sorrow over the particulars of the story was made worse by the inevitable statements that we need to have a national “conversation” about gun control and mental health. Except that, for some, it’s not the right time; apparently, it’s NEVER the right time, because we’re always reeling from the last event. Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York said, correctly, “If now is not the time to have a serious discussion about gun control and the epidemic of gun violence plaguing our society, I don’t know when is.”

After President Reagan was nearly assassinated in March 1981, there was a “commonsense” limit on assault weapons, but that law lapsed nearly a decade ago. Even before then, we’ve ALWAYS been having “conversations” about these things; we TALKED after the 1999 Columbine, high school shootings in Colorado, and the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, and the Arizona shootings last year, and the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooters this past summer.

The “conversation” after this latest event thus far is more of the same. Why are mass shootings becoming more common? Some say we should have MORE people carrying guns. Yeah, right, against a guy in a movie theater wearing body armor packing heat, in a dark theater, with smoke bombs; heard THAT argument rehashed Friday night on CNN. At least I didn’t hear anyone suggesting five-year-olds should be packing heat.

More noise: Mike Huckabee uselessly telling us that school “carnage” caused by having “removed God” from schools. Ultimately, I think the Onion got it right.

Here’s my position: the Second Amendment right to bear arms is no more absolute than the First Amendment right to free speech. One cannot yell “fire” into a crowded building; one ought not be able to fire into a crowded building.

I’m done talking about it. If we don’t DO something, I don’t want to listen to more of the same rhetoric when this happens the next time. And there WILL be a next time, with the number of guns in this country.

The one thing I’m still mulling over: how to tell my elementary school-age daughter. She’ll surely find out from her friends. I don’t want her to be afraid to go to school. How do I make her feel safe, even though I can’t promise her it couldn’t happen again?
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Newtown shooting: Names, profiles of the 27 people killed.

Happy memories of Newtown, from the town children’s librarian from 1994-1996.

It was a very Dark Knight

Maybe they would have stopped this guy, in a darkened room, after a gas canister had been set off, if they were Navy SEALS, or something.

 

I’ve never been to a midnight, opening night showing of a movie. I’ve gone to premieres, though, and I do know what cinematic anticipation feels like. There’s just something about seeing something before almost anyone else that provides an unusual sense of satisfaction. Your view of the film is not colored by what everyone else says.

If I were to have gone to a recent midnight showing, The Dark Knight Rises would not have been it.

While I’ve seen Batman movies starring Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and even Adam West, I passed on the George Clooney iteration, Batman and Robin, and I just haven’t seen any of the Christian Bale films, Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), or, obviously, the new one.

Of course, the shootings at the opening of TDKR in Aurora, Colorado were awful. I watched a bunch of news shows, trying, and failing, to make sense of it all. That often happens for me with tragedies, from the JFK assassination to 9/11. At some point, I find that I just had to stop. Not incidentally, read what Ken Levine wrote, especially about a movie trailer showing before the film; yikes.

Ideally, this would be an opportunity for people to come together in their common grief. Instead, and all you need to read is a half dozen comments on just about any news site, that devolve into a debate about something divisive and snarky; Thom Wade addresses this. So we need to ban guns. No, everyone should have been packing heat, and they would have stopped this guy, in a darkened room, after a gas canister had been set off; maybe they would have if they were Navy SEALS or something. The shootings are the President’s fault because the alleged shooter was apparently on the dole, and the Obama welfare state encourages crazy behavior; no, I couldn’t follow that one either. It’s a continuation of the attack on Judeo-Christian beliefs; what?

(And don’t get me started on the pre-tragedy Rush Limbaugh’s “connection” between the movie villain Bane, created in 1993, and Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, as some sort of liberal political plot; well, maybe retroactively.)

I think, though, that inappropriate fan response to negative reviews, which forced the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes to disable user commentary for the film, is a form of the same maddening mindset I find so disturbing in this country. Some so-called fans threatened violence against movie critics who did not think the movie was a perfect 10, threatening to crash critics’ websites.

My thoughts are with the family and friends of the victims, their community, and indeed, all of us.

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