Another Dark Night

Even when I was younger and better at staying up late, I wasn’t much one for midnight movies. Being among the first people to see a new film never was very important to me, and I wasn’t a member of the Rocky Horror cult or the avid fan bases of other movies that were midnight mainstays.

Not to mention that big crowds—as well as small but randy ones—tend to mean big noise. I hate noise in theaters. I don’t attend movies for the communal experience, and I prize silence among my fellow filmgoers. It frankly annoys me even when people talk during the coming attractions. I wish the public service announcement that tells people to silence their cell phones and refrain from “adding their own soundtrack” would be enforced by bouncers strong enough to literally toss egregious offenders out the door.

But I’ll stop short of even jokingly urging here that noisemakers be shot, out of abundant sensitivity to this morning’s news out of Aurora, Colorado, that a lone gunman, wearing a gasmask and a bullet-proof vest, opened fire last night in a packed theater during a midnight screening of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. But, by the by, count this as another disincentive for me to attend midnight movies: the risk of being choked by teargas and pumped full of lead by some maladjusted masked avenger in gun-crazy America—a nation where the predictable reaction to this slaughter will be for the National Rifle Association and its millions of diehards (pun somewhat intended) to lobby all the harder for laws facilitating the arming of every audience member and theater employee—the better to kill the next bastard before he kills you.

In fact, I can see the ad campaign now: “Guns don’t kill people. People without guns allow guns to kill people.” Perhaps the spots will end with the stark image of the line of police tape—illuminated against the night sky by the theater’s bright neon—ringing the Colorado multiplex.

As I write this, much about last night’s bloodbath remains unknown. The suspect has been identified as 24-year-old James Holmes, and I just read an ABC News report out of San Diego that quoted his mom as saying, “You have the right person.” (It’s unclear whether than means her gut told her he’s capable of such a thing or he’d actually chit-chatted on the phone one evening about someday wanting to rid Gotham City of all the midnight moviegoers who ever put him down.) The most-recent casualty toll I read was 12 dead and 50 injured. There were unconfirmed reports of undetonated bombs having been found at his apartment complex. No word as yet on motive, although I’m guessing it will end up being something more substantive, but no less crazy, than profound disappointment with the quality of first two installments of the Batman film trilogy.

It’s really hard for me to know what else to write about this, even as I feel compelled to address it. I’ve written it all before: My horror at the utterly preventable carnage every time something like this or Virginia Tech or Columbine (what is it about Colorado?) happens, my sense of helplessness and despair in the face of the NRA’s strangling power and this nation’s historic deification of the Second Amendment, and my concurrent scorn for my own inaction and conviction that nothing I can do by way of personal advocacy or check-writing possibly will help lead to the adoption of meaningful gun-control laws.

Hence the “soft lead” to this post: A bitter joke about eschewing midnight movies, ‘cause they’ll kill ya.

Yeah, I know that taking guns out the hands of private citizens wouldn’t solve everything. The standard argument of gun apologists is that criminals always will find ways to secure firearms, and that if gun ownership is severely restricted by law, only thugs and (literally outgunned) law enforcement officers will be armed. Well, never mind the fact that meaningful gun control is a statistically proven deterrent to homicide, serving well to protect the public order in every nation in which it’s enforced. At very least, I’ve got to think, gun laws with teeth would leave less weaponry lying around for self-proclaimed superheroes of savagery, collegiate misfits, Goth goons and other sad-but-dangerous sociopaths to wield in waging their vendettas against what they perceive as a hostile world.

How many mass shootings will it take for America finally to disarm? I don’t think even Hollywood could conceive of that many sequels. Rather, expect our homegrown dark knights to return—rifles and pistols blazing—again and again.