12 dead, 58 injured in Colorado at midnight showing of Dark Knight

I wish I was friends with that person so I could motherfuck them and then defriend them.

 

Many rich white people have gotten what they wanted their entire lives and for the first time four years ago, things did not go their way. It scares many of them.

 

You know who needs to be fighting the good fight? All the "responsible gun owners" we hear from and hear about at times like these.

Responsible gun owners need to shout down this UN nonsense. And they need to reassert themselves within the NRA.

 

Man, some folk need to grow up and take a double dose of STFU!!

 

There are several insanity defenses that states use. The one you refer to - "simply showing that he suffers from a mental illness" - is known as the "New Hampshire" or "Durham" test, and it essentially states that all you have to show is that "but for" your mental illness, you would not have committed the crime. It is by far the easiest insanity defense to be able to plead.

I haven't read the Colorado statute or case law interpreting it, but from what I've read, they use a combination of the M'Naughten test - which is not being able to tell right from wrong - and the "irresistible impulse" test, which requires that the crime was an irresistible impulse, obviously, that the person could not stop himself from doing.

My initial thought is that it would be awfully hard for him to successfully plead that, considering the elaborate planning that went into this.

Remember: "Insanity" is not a clinical, psychiatric term. It's a legal term. Mental illness is certainly a big component of legal insanity, but suffering from mental illness does not necessarily give someone grounds for an insanity defense. In fact, expert witnesses, like psychiatrists, are typically not even permitted to testify as to the legal conclusion of whether a person was "insane" for purposes of the test. That's for the jury to decide, based upon the clinical diagnosis and other evidence.

 

Too much history, you know?

Not to be an apologist for the lunatic fringe, but I honestly do think that sometimes people can't differentiate on the Internet, like we can, legitimate news sources from the other garbage that's out there. My mom, for example, is still good for an alarmist forwarded chain email every couple weeks or so, nearly 20 years into the Internet's rise to prominence. To her, there is absolutely no difference between the New York Times and some email that a friend of a friend forwarded to her about Morgellon's disease.

 

Is there any doubt that if the killer was an illegal alien, the vast right wing lobby groups and ALL the media would be all over this is an immigration story? If the killer had a muslim sounding name, all the media would be broadcasting and printing their investigations into his background to see if he has terrorists connections?

But when a Christian gun nut goes on a human hunting spree it's the rare media outlet that talks about gun control, and that's mostly why no one is talking about gun control, and none talk about his Christianity.

So it's ok to use a tragedy to talk about immigration reform or terrorism, but it's wrong to use a mass killing with legally purchased weapons to discuss banning guns.

 

3OctaveFart = Dana Stevens?

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/07/aurora_shooting_the_parallels_between_the_world_of_dark_knight_rises_and_our_own_.html

Stevens is an unapologetic feminist, and that comes through here, as well, with a line in there about how movies are marketed now only to young men, and how that's a problem, etc., etc. No value judgment from me on her approach. It is what it is.

EDIT: Changed "Dana" to "Stevens." I wouldn't call Ebert "Roger." For the record, I called her that because I'm used to her first name being used on the Slate culture gabfest.

 

Yep. And once he took the oath, they decided to make the man's job difficult by not passing any of his initiatives, question his birthright and change voting rules. What are they going to do when he wins again?
Fear of a Black planet is what Public Enemy called it.

 

If burning the American Flag isn't a 1st Amendment issue to Republicans, then why is human hunting with firearms a second amendment issue to the right wing Christians

 

It comes down to deep suspicion of the other side. They are convinced that it's the first step for Democrats to get their foot in the door on widespread gun bans. That once you chip away at the Second Amendment a little bit, the whole thing becomes vulnerable. I'm sure that there is some institutional memory about how desegregation occurred - a decades long, piecemeal, patient attack by the NAACP.

 

The right wing Christians just don't care that 12 people were killed and 51 wounded Friday night as long as they get to keep their guns.

It's that simple.

Is it irony that the right wing Christian news network's second largest owner is the muslim Saudi Royal Family?