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Judge enters not guilty plea for Aurora shooter

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:36:00 +0000

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) -- The judge in the deadly Colorado movie theater shooting case entered a not guilty plea on behalf of James Holmes on Tuesday after the former graduate student's defense team said he was not ready to enter one.

If Holmes is convicted, he could be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison. Judge William Sylvester said Holmes, 25, can change his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity later, if he chooses.

Such a change could be the only way Holmes could avoid life in prison or execution.

Prosecutors, for their part, have not said yet whether they will pursue the death penalty, announcing Tuesday that they will make their decision known on April 1.

The judge set Aug. 5 for the start of the trial. Prosecutors and defense attorneys declined comment.

As he has done in past hearings, Holmes sat silently through Tuesday's proceedings. He wore a red jail jumpsuit and sported a thick, bushy beard and unkempt dark brown hair.

When he walked into the courtroom, he looked at his parents, James and Arlene Holmes. They sat silently at the front of the room and left without comment after the hearing.

Nazis, breasts and guns: Has Madonna lost it?

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 15:35:00 +0000

“What’s up with Madonna lately?” a friend asked recently as we were attempting to evade the oppressive July heat in a Manhattan bookstore. She was referring, of course, to Madonna’s super-controversial summer. And she’s not the only one wondering.

Currently on a world tour to promote her latest album, “MDNA,” Madonna’s recent antics have been a bit dramatic, even for her. Let us count the bizarre shenanigans from the beginning. Since June, she’s flashed a nipple during a Turkey live show, flashed her butt a few days later in Italy, shown a video with swastikas superimposed over right-wing leaders’ faces, and continued to use authentic-looking fake guns as part of her choreography even after being asked to cut them from the show following July 20’s movie-theater massacre in Aurora, Colo.

NRA’s phony gun control

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:45:00 +0000

If National Rifle Association executives, directors and lobbyists actually believed their own propaganda about the danger of Barack Obama being reelected, one would think that they'd be taking out second mortgages on their homes to underwrite efforts to defeat him. The fact that not a single one of them has donated to the NRA's political action committee -- the Political Victory Fund -- in this election does not, in itself, prove that they don't believe NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre's assertion that Obama's reelection will mean the end of the Second Amendment. But when LaPierre tells NRA members that "this election will decide whether Americans remain free" and that, "If you don't do your part, our sacred Second Amendment will fall apart," while he and the other NRA big shots contribute nothing, it should make one wonder.

It is, of course, possible that LaPierre, along with other top NRA executives (who are paid anywhere from $250,000 to more than $1 million a year), and the organization's 76 directors and 29 lobbyists believe that they contribute enough just working to convince the rest of their 4 million members to donate to the NRA. But the facts suggest rather that NRA officials are fully aware not only that what they're saying about Obama and the 2012 election is absurd but that much of what they're telling their members on a day-to-day basis is unadulterated nonsense.

Hold the Reddit hype

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:30:00 +0000

As you will know if you are a person on the Internet, a lot of the most important details about the shooting in a Colorado movie theater last Friday have come out through the Internet. We were able to find victims' Twitter accounts (including that of Jessica Ghawi, who posted enthusiastically right up to the start of the movie), survivors' stories on WordPress, and one of the few photos of accused shooter James Holmes on Adult Friend Finder.

“Gangster Squad”: A theater shooting in a movie. Too soon?

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:20:00 +0000

Movies are our escape. But they're also our catharsis. They're how we work through our fear and anger, how we make sense of the senseless. And in the wake of the most profoundly senseless acts, the challenge for the entertainment industry is to figure out at what point a once-innocuous scene becomes a painful reminder of a tragedy, or when an image, a reference or a word takes on unintended meaning. When terrible things happen, the question almost immediately arises: How soon is too soon?

That's the issue at hand for the upcoming film "Gangster Squad," a 1940s-era crime drama that features Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Emma Stone – and a scene of a squad of thugs opening fire in a crowded movie theater. The scene is featured prominently in the trailer that Warner Bros. released in May.

It's not the first movie moment of its kind. "Inglourious Basterds," after all, features a scene of horrendous movie theater carnage. And "Scream 2" features a murder at the hands of a masked killer in the midst of a pumped-up movie crowd.

Muzzled by a disaster

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 16:23:00 +0000

Cultures have rituals, and one of our most unique rituals is the Disaster Aftermath. A catastrophe hits, and we now expect a practiced and precise response: the interviews with survivors, the rhythmic press conferences at set daily times, the politicians preening for attention, the predictable partisan debates over alleged causes and supposed solutions. As the aftermath of the Aurora shooting shows in such hideous detail, this is America's funereal requiem in the soul-sucking Information Age, a clichéd spectacle that substitutes screeching noise for some desperately needed silence.

This perverse banality, of course, often ends up disrespecting the dead and undermining the healing process by shoving real-life victims into the maws of the Political-Media Monster. It's soul-sapping to watch, but, then, these post-atrocity atrocities do at least spotlight the ugly -- and often baseless -- assumptions that lurk in the shadows of our collective psyche.

As I noted on Friday, after Aurora, one assumption revolves around "terrorism," specifically, what it is, and what it is not.

NRA: A lobby for criminals

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:52:00 +0000

We've read the sickening script before. Following virtually every mass shooting in the United States, the news media focuses briefly on the question of whether anything can be done to prevent such incidents in the future. Soon, a softly spoken "no" infiltrates the coverage, either out of sheer hopelessness or the certain knowledge that our elected officials are so firmly in the thrall of the gun lobby that they quiver in fear at the mere thought of contemplating even tepid measures advanced by gun control advocates in the wake of the latest atrocity. If the aftermath of Aurora (12 dead, 58 wounded) plays out as others of recent or fading memory -- Tuscaloosa, two weeks ago (18 wounded), Tucson in 2011 (six dead, 14 wounded), Binghamton in 2009 (13 dead, four wounded), Ft. Hood also in 2009 (13 dead, 29 wounded), Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 dead, 17 wounded), Northern Illinois University in 2008 (five dead, 21 wounded), Columbine in 1999 (12 dead, 21 wounded), etc. -- the role of the National Rifle Association will be lightly brushed over, then dismissed.

It shouldn't be. Here's why.

Gun control stirs little support

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 13:45:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — Gun control advocates sputter at their own impotence. The National Rifle Association is politically ascendant. And Barack Obama's White House pledges to safeguard the Second Amendment in its first official response to the deaths of at least 12 people in a mass shooting at a new Batman movie screening in suburban Denver.

Once, every highly publicized outbreak of gun violence produced strong calls from Democrats and a few Republicans for tougher controls on firearms.

Now those pleas are muted, a political paradox that's grown more pronounced in an era scarred by Columbine, Virginia Tech, the wounding of a congresswoman and now the shootings in a suburban movie theater where carnage is expected on-screen only.

"We don't want sympathy. We want action," Dan Gross, president of the Brady campaign said Friday as President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney mourned the dead.

Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, was more emphatic than many in the early hours after the shootings. "Everyone is scared of the NRA," he said on MSNBC. "Number one, there are some things worth losing for in politics and to be able to prevent carnage like this is worth losing for."

“Dark Knight” Aurora shooting: Deadly deja vu

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Early Friday morning a 24-year-old named James E. Holmes apparently walked into a screening of the new Batman movie in Aurora, Colo., with an AR-15 rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and two .40 caliber handguns, and shot 71 people, of whom 12 are now dead. What is perhaps most distressing about this recent shooting in terms of its statement about modern American life is that so many people had the exact same reaction: “How could this happen – again?”

Like each of the other massacres that we have had in recent years, the public discussion will soon turn to the question of what we can and should do to prevent future tragedies like this. Those who oppose gun control will emphasize the role played by the individual who carried out these terrible acts. In the case of this most recent tragedy in Aurora, initial news accounts suggest the shooter had dyed his hair red and told the police he was the Joker.

There is of course another contributing factor – the widespread availability of guns in the U.S. Absent the sort of high-powered weaponry available to James Holmes, it is hard to see how yesterday’s tragedy could have been remotely on this scale. Absent his AR-15 rifle, his 12-gauge shotgun, and his two .40 caliber handguns, there is almost no way that 71 families would be devastated today. It is the combination of people who are deranged or angry or impulsive, and the 250 million to 300 million guns in circulation in the U.S., that results in tragedy.

“We’ve made monsters of ourselves”

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Sometimes it is too easy to know too much about terrible things, and it is even easier to share your opinions about terrible things. We have Twitter and Facebook and our blogs and comment fields at our disposal. We have every opportunity to respond to everything we read, and in times of tragedy, in particular, we turn to these places where we can respond so we can be heard, so we can be seen, so we are not alone in our mourning or our outrage.

I go to the movies all the time. I see everything. I love sitting in the theater, the air reeking of popcorn and sugar. I love the endless reel of trailers and the way the theater darkens before the movie starts. Even when a movie is bad, it is so, so good. Most of us go to the movies with some regularity, and that's why the massacre, for that is what it is, in Aurora, Colo., might resonate with us more than other tragedies. It could have been us, sitting in the darkened theater, waiting for "The Dark Knight" to rise. It could have been us thinking this was some kind of elaborate premiere stunt, when a man threw a smoke bomb into the theater. It could have been us screaming and choking on smoke and trying to breathe through the stench of blood and gunpowder as we realized that this was not a movie, not at all, and that at any moment, a bullet could tear through the tender flesh of our bodies. These kinds of massacres are an uncomfortable reminder that it could always be us, no matter where we are, no matter who we are.

Aurora shooting eyewitness: “We just ran for it”

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Melanie Haiken and her two daughters, Melia and Linnea Schurig, came to Aurora, Colo., to attend a conference for families with children who stutter. It was the ninth straight year the family had attended the conference, and the community of families that comes together each summer keeps in close touch throughout the rest of the year. So close that this year a group of 12 teenagers had arranged to see the midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises."

"Parents weren't invited," said Haiken by phone from the conference. But with Melia a college sophomore at California's Humboldt State, and Linnea about to start her senior year of high school, the outing was hardly unusual. Her biggest worry, said Haiken, had to do with the fact that teenagers she didn't know that well would be driving in a strange town.

At 12:30, just as she went to bed, she noticed that she had turned the ringer off her phone and missed three messages from one daughter and two from the other. They were calling her from a car racing home from the theater. Her daughters were safe, but one of the 12 teenagers in the group was in the hospital -- he had been shot in the arm by James Holmes, the former Ph.D. student in neuroscience who went on a deadly rampage Thursday night in Aurora.

Does Batman have blood on his hands?

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 18:40:00 +0000

We still don't know enough about the shootings during a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" in suburban Denver to say much about the motivations of the gunman, who has been identified as a 24-year-old man named James Holmes. What we do know is that at least 12 people who went to the movies on Thursday night, no doubt excited to be among the first paying customers to see the biggest Hollywood spectacle of the year, are never going home again. At least 59 other moviegoers were reportedly injured, some of them seriously.

We also know that the reputation of Christopher Nolan's dark and violent blockbuster has been marred, perhaps permanently, by its association with these senseless murders. I can guarantee you that some of the more hardheaded executives at Warner Bros. are already wondering (in private) how this incident will affect the global box-office take, which is likely to exceed $1 billion. No one is ever likely to forget that "The Dark Knight Rises," a movie in which a masked supervillain imposes his will on ordinary people through violence and terror, apparently attracted the attention of a real-life masked villain who inflicted violence and terror on a theater full of total strangers. (To be clear, it seems unlikely that Holmes modeled himself after Bane, the villain played by Tom Hardy in "The Dark Knight Rises." Multiple news reports have indicated, however, that he identified himself to police as the Joker, the villain played by Heath Ledger in Nolan's previous Batman film.)

Aurora: We shouldn’t be surprised

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:20:00 +0000

America is a violent country – our homicide rate is four to 12 times higher than that in more civilized parts of the world – and Aurora, Colo., is more violent than the average American town. A down-market suburb of Denver, it sees an average of about 20 of its 325,000 residents murdered each year.

This fact is a matter of almost total indifference to the local – let alone the national – media, since the murders are rarely considered noteworthy by the news business, which is to say the victims are rarely either sufficiently rich or telegenic to garner more than cursory attention.

A lot of people – about 15,000 at present – get murdered in the United States every year. Most of these people get killed in places that, roughly speaking, look something like Aurora: places where the people are poorer and less white than in America in general, and who are therefore by definition not very interesting or important.

Of course these rules don’t hold if some lunatic kills a dozen people at once, especially in a normally innocuous public space, such as a multi-screen movie theater, which interesting and important people can picture themselves within. So today murder in Aurora, Colo., is an interesting and important topic.

Colorado shooting liveblog

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 10:15:00 +0000

6:03 p.m.:

Authorities are just beginning to take the bodies out of the movie theater. END OF LIVEBLOG.

6:02 p.m.:

TPM has a new profile of suspected shooter James Holmes who will be arraigned on Monday:

Growing up in San Diego, James Eagan Holmes was seen by his neighbors as an “everyday guy,” a smart kid who was otherwise unremarkable.

But by Friday, the young man was being described by Colorado’s governor as a “very deranged mind” and was the sole suspect in a horrific massacre that left 12 people dead and 59 wounded at a movie theater in the Denver suburbs.

There are still many questions unanswered about how Holmes, now 24, went from the quiet teen in California to an alleged mass killer in Aurora, Colo. But just hours after the massacre, a clearer portrait was emerging of his life leading up to it.

5:58 p.m.:

An email just arrived with the view of conservative commentator Andy Martin who blames president Obama for the massacre: