Movie going has been one of the staple American pass times, after baseball and football. Out of all the things that can go wrong in the movie theatre; the projector jams, the theatre seats turn out to be dirty, the air-conditioning doesn’t work, the movie sucks, and so on. Out of all those things people might expect from a movie night experience, no one walks into a movie theatre in the US expecting to be shot.
The moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado certainly did not expect that and yet twelve are dead and countless others injured by one seemingly deranged gunman. I had heard about the Colorado shooting not from the news channels, but from a post on Facebook by a Georgian friend who had friends in the movie theatre who survived. I flipped on CNN and there it was the Colorado movie massacre on the 24-hour rotation. A day later Facebook comments started to flutter in and although first day of the shooting the comments were all about praying for the families of the victims, the second day the comments turned a bit ugly. Now it was all about, ‘who brings a three month old to a midnight movie?’ and ‘how come no one rushed the gunman?’ and ‘it would have been better if everyone else had guns’ that way they could have taken the mad man out before he could kill as many people as he did. One commenter, a young man who has become a war veteran too soon was complaining about the lack of initiative people in the movie theatre showed in trying to stop the crazed gunman. But a war veteran will never again look at everyday life as a regular civilian; he would have been trained to seek enemies out everywhere. Even in the movie theatre. For the rest of the population who didn’t go off fighting a war and has no idea how to shoot let alone hold a gun, and is generally a peaceful population at that, the idea that an enemy lurks in every dark corner, or in this case movie theatre, is an alien one. And it should be like that. Who wants to live in a society where everyone is walking around with their guns drawn, and suspicion in their eyes? We already lived through the Wild West and there is a reason we as a society decided it wasn’t the way to live any longer. After this insane tragedy, for which the shooter still has to account for, the society that has evolved since the Wild West days, instead of running off to stock up on guns and ammunition, the society fought back in the only was that mattered. The movie theatres were packed this whole weekend. To rise above the fear is the way to defeat it and the moviegoers seemed to be saying exactly that by their presence in move theatres across the country.
