There was no red flag July 20 in Aurora, Colo. The unthinkable became reality with no rhyme or reason to support why a man entered a movie theater with plans to kill. In minutes, enough rounds had been shot to kill 12 people and injure 70.
Just like that. It has nothing to do with time and place, but everything to do the with the shooter’s fragile, broken mentality. It can be hard to understand why things like this happen. It some cases, it doesn’t make sense at all.
The University of Idaho was devastated with multiple student deaths last year, and as a campus community we were shocked, mourned and eventually healed together. It was an eye-opening experience during the first week of classes when UI Assistant Professor Ernesto A. Bustamante shot and killed UI graduate student Katy Benoit.
But that’s often the outcome of tragic circumstances — you see life and the conflictions of humanity in a different way.
The fact that Holmes left two crime scenes, one littered with shrapnel and innocent blood in the Center 16 Theater that he terrorized and another in his trap-filled apartment is one of those conflictions. It’s unsettling and confusing. While one scene is all too open and too trenchant, the other scene is volatile and utterly unpredictable.
What scares us most is not the issue of gun control, even though it has been pushed into the limelight as the solution to tragedies like this. The issue is human instability. We’re forced to quickly absorb the fact that yet another “safe” place — a place that we go with friends, family and our children — is a place that could so easily become a tragedy.
No one could have anticipated what would happen in the movie theater at the midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” because, just like everyone else, the suspect is human — part of a race that can be all too unpredictable.
Being human can be such a beautiful blessing when it comes to the ability to deal with complex emotions. Yet it can also turn into such a curse when these emotions come forth, spilling onto the floor like bullet casings. Humans, collectively and individually, are completely nonlinear. And that’s the way it will always be.
Chloe Rambo can be reached at [email protected]