The Aurora Shooting and the Loss of Personal Responsibility

As someone who posts at Red Alerts on gun rights and laws, it seems appropriate that I would have something to say after the tragic event in Aurora. But I’m not going to get on a soapbox about the 2nd amendment. We as a culture always have the two-sided argument after killing sprees and we will continue to do so. Pro-gun rights people aren’t going to convince the anti-gun crowd of facts.

I did, however, want to address a couple of issues. Unfortunately, ABC came out immediately after the shooting and stated that the shooter was a tea partier.  They had the wrong guy. This turned out to be bogus information that could have been easily researched by a true journalist in a short period of time.

I’m saddened by the quickness with which the media jumped to politicize this horror. One of the underlying issues that struck me is how our culture has so embraced the blame game, not just blaming gun laws or political affiliation but anything that would remove responsibility from the evil individual who perpetrates such a horrific act.

I’m not a lawyer or psychiatrist but I hope that he doesn’t get to use the crazy defense
even though words like whacko, psycho and nutjob are easily applied to James Holmes. This took forethought and planning. That must mean something in the eyes of the
law. And it’s difficult not to get political because I believe this blame culture we’re
engulfed in is directly a result of liberal victimhood programming.

This individual made the choice to murder. The responsibility is his alone. Every time the
media jumps to assume that some outside force caused him to make these choices, it feeds the lie that the individual isn’t in control of his life. Of course many people have hard lives and some repeat the violence they grew up with.

But this message shouldn’t be the norm and there was a time when it wasn’t. We went from being too stiff and never wanting to make allowances to blaming someone or something else for every dark aspect of our lives. We’ve lost the balance between individual responsibility and societal nurturing. I wonder if by making the shooter a victim of
society instead of his own choices that the victims are that much easier to make faceless,
nameless and therefore forgotten.  And that’s just one step closer to making us all the dependent drones the left wants us to be.

The shooter as per usual is getting most of the press by the MSM. But others are
challenging this. Dave Swindle of P.J. Media has a piece up honoring the victims.  Twitchy is keeping up with Twitter including reporting that the mother of one of the victims, Jessica Redfield, wished that her daughter’s name would trend above the
shooter.

I hope rather than believe that their senseless deaths won’t continue to be made a media
spectacle. My thoughts and prayers go out to those left behind.