Before the dead had even been carried from the cinema in Colorado on Friday afternoon a CBS broadcaster said in a solemn radio editorial: ”We’ll eventually find out who James Holmes is, but he’s not a terrorist, we’re told, and thousands of other showings were peaceful, so really we have to start seeing these things as natural disasters, like an earthquake or a tornado.”
That this view was swept away in the deluge of sad commentary on Friday was surprising to me, an outsider.
By this standard James Holmes was not a young man armed more heavily than the soldiers the US fields in Afghanistan, but an event, an act of god, to be weathered rather than countered. Read more
Sources
- Nick O’Malley in The Sydney Morning Herald
- Image: International Business Times
Nick O’Malley is the US correspondent of The Sydney Morning Herald
Additional readingNews category: Analysis and Comment.