Fucking quit it, America. Stop acting so fucking terrible:
At least 4 people have been arrested, accused in separate incidents of making threats during or after screenings of the new Batman movie, underscoring moviegoers' anxieties and heightened security in the wake of a deadly mass shooting at a Colorado theater showing "The Dark Knight Rises."
Most of the incidents have to do with people acting like assholes, but this one from my home state sounds especially troubling:
And in Maine one man was arrested when he told authorities that he was on his way to shoot a former employer a day after watching "The Dark Knight Rises," state police said.
Timothy Courtois of Biddeford, Me., had been stopped for speeding, and a police search of his car found an AK-47 assault weapon, four handguns, ammunition and news clippings about the mass shooting that left 12 people dead early Friday, authorities said.
I hate this. I hate all of this. I hate what happened. I hate that the perpetrator's face is plastered all over every website I go to like some sort of celebrity. I hate that news outlets don't have anything to report but they're still reporting on it anyway. I hate that movie theaters will be prone to these sorts of Age-of-Terror overreactions for months to come. And I hate that this will happen all over again at some point in the future, when another person who's slipped through the cracks legally buys a bunch of guns and decides to force his will on the world. I hate that the safety net is in tatters. And I hate that President Obama's statement after the shooting dared to use the word "shocked."
Of course he was "saddened." We were all saddened. But can you even say you're "shocked" anymore in America when a young man murders and injures dozens of people in a matter of minutes? We've all lived through this before, dozens of times. The scale is always different, but the crime is the exact same. There's nothing shocking about it anymore. I bet you the cable news networks have protocols and procedures written out in memos for this sort of thing happening. Because it happens all the fucking time. That's the opposite of shocking. It's a recurring problem. And rather than try to come up with solutions to this recurring problem, we mutter and mumble about being shocked and saddened, and we accuse each other of politicizing a tragic event.
Well, the thing is, politics is how we as a society discuss and fix problems. And for some reason I don't understand, we're not allowed to use politics to solve this problem. Instead, we're shocked and saddened every goddamned time, like we have absolutely no ability to exercise any amount of control over the events. Yes, terrible things happen. But according to the law, if you know a terrible thing is going to happen and you don't try to stop the terrible thing from happening, you deserve part of the blame.
I repeat: This is a chronic, recurring problem in America and nobody with any power is talking about solving the problem. That's the shocking part.