Aurora, Colorado

First of all, everyone should know that Batman never uses guns. They are what killed his parents. He's smarter than that and his superpower, as my husband likes to say, is that he never loses.

Coming on the heels of Comic-con, what happened in Colorado is particularly tragic to a lot of people I know, and the negative publicity DC, Warner Bros, and the comic book industry are getting because of this one sociopath is unwarranted. Batman is about justice, so I'm pretty annoyed that the news media keeps harping on the killer's Batman poster and doesn't spend a lot of time talking about his being raised in a religious household. The failure to report on this last point is letting Mike Huckabee and others get away with claiming that a lack of religion is what leads to what happened in Colorado. I doubt it, because I've seen ample evidence that an OVERLOAD of religious zealotry leads to many tragedies.

The shooter's background and his behavior in court remind me so much of Edward Norton's character in Primal Fear, a brilliant sociopath who is gaming the system. And I keep wondering if the murderer is color blind, choosing a red hair dye to emulate the Joker instead of the appropriate green color of the Joker's hair. I do not spend too much time thinking about this, however.

What I do think about is the piece that victim Jessica Ghawi/Redfield wrote after barely missing a similar, senseless shooting in Toronto barely a month before she died in Aurora. If you haven't read it, here is a link. I'm sorry her Spider-sense wasn't working last week.