Anomaly

There's not much to say about the shooting in Aurora, Colorado except there are some crazy people out there.  Perhaps after a few weeks we can try to put it in a larger context (one that should include the fact that murder has been going down for over twenty years in America, and is at levels we haven't seen since the early 60s), but right now feelings are probably too raw to try to make sense of anything.

But that didn't stop people from getting on their hobby-horses and explaining what it all meant.  I won't go over them (though my friend Matt Welch has listed a few), though certainly a special prize has to go to Brian Ross of ABC, who speculated there may be a link to the Tea Party since there was a Tea Party member in Colorado matchng the killer's name.  Even if "Jim Holmes" weren't a common name this is almost unbelievably dumb, not to mention revolting.

There's an obvious problem trying to tie what Holmes did to anyone or anything else.  We've got over 300 million people in the country and only a handful have ever gone on a shooting spree.  No matter what aspect of Holmes' life interests you there are probably millions of others with similar tastes or activities who haven't shot up a movie theatre.  I'm not saying there can't be violent movements or criminal organizations that represent dangerous conspiracies, but in most cases like Holmes', it's hard to use the shooter to prove anything except that he did something horrible that even people who share certain similarities would never even consider.