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Esme's Blog: Seeing Batman After The Colorado Shootings

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- My 13-year-old son went to "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises" with a friend Friday night, as did thousands of other young people across the country.

Movies are a place where parents, especially of tweens and teens, can feel their children who are at an age where they love to push boundaries, are safe. The Colorado shooting is horrific on so many levels. There are those seeking to blame Colorado's liberal gun laws. Certainly the easy access James Holmes had to semi-automatic weapons helped him slaughter and injure more victims more quickly. But a deranged soul bent on mass murder could find other ways to kill.

Then there is the news that a trailer for a Warner Brothers Film to be released this fall features a scene similar to the Colorado shooting. In the "Gangster Squad," trailer mobsters start shooting at a crowd in a movie theater from behind the screen. The trailer has been running for weeks. Did James Holmes see the trailer? Warner Brothers has pulled the trailer from movie theaters and is considering cutting the scene out of the movie. Is violence in the media in part to blame? Possibly, but someone bent on mass murder could draw inspiration from anywhere.

Lunatic, psycho and deranged. Those are among the words being tossed around to describe James Holmes. I would offer another: Coward. The lone lunatic coward is a threat that always is out there. What can be done to prevent and protect society from these individuals? We can take precautions, but there is no measure that can absolutely guarantee the prevention of future atrocities.

And so reluctantly, I let my son see "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises."

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