This is the hottest summer in recorded Colorado history. There are forest fires in the mountains. There is gunfire in the city.

On the morning we awoke to the murders in Aurora, I was packing to leave for Disneyland. To our surprise, for end-of-life care is expensive, my mother left a small sum to be divided among her children. I wanted to spend my inheritance as I thought she might have spent it, for something fun. My daughter and I made plans to take the four oldest grandchildren to Disneyland and then to visit family in nearby Los Angeles. Our younger son and his wife, teachers on summer vacation, agreed to join us.

At the last minute, my daughter decided to bring Leo, her 2-year-old son, along on the trip. Read more

Sources

• Melissa Musick Nussbaum in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Denver Post

Melissa Musick Nussbaum is an NCR columnist.

Nor, apparently, can anyone else. If they could have, then they would have done so already. Some of us are old enough to remember when a madman poisoned packages of Tylenol in 1982. Seven people died, and the reaction was immediate: the entire run of the product was recalled. Packaging was changed so that the buyer would know it's safe and wasn't tampered with. Liberal or conservative had nothing to do with it. It was not treated as a political issue. No one claimed that making it marginally harder to get at those headache pills was the first step toward dictatorship. Read more

Sources

• D L Hughley in Huffington Post
• Image: The Guardian

D L Hughley is an actor and stand-up comedian.

"Was he demon possessed? Maybe. It happens," the Rev. Dwight Longenecker wrote at the Patheos website, where the Catholic priest from Greenville, S.C., is a columnist.

Religious leaders and public figures have sparked some of the most heated discussions in the wake of the tragedy as they have offered various explanations for the violent outburst and spiritual guidance for dealing with it. Read more

Sources

• David Gibson in Huff Post Religion
• Image: Mystic Politics

David Gibson is a columnist for the Religious News Service of the Huffington Post

This is not the first, nor will it be the last time unfortunately. The ghastly details of the tragic slayings in Colorado are now common knowledge. Yet many experts agree that dramatic, hysterical publicising of the perpetrator and his crime can feed the so called copycat compulsion.

So how do we reconcile the legitimate need to know, respond and inform with the potential for inciting further violence from other vulnerable, disturbed individuals 'out there'? Furthermore, with so much information instantly available on the internet, is any kind of containment and control possible? Read more

Sources

• Lyn Bender in Eureka Street
• Image: Vanity Fair

Lyn Bender is a Melbourne based psychologist.

That was my colleague Adam Gopnik commenting the other day on America's attitude toward gun laws. Having read some of the comments on my own post about President Obama's failure to pursue more restrictions on the sale of firearms, I can only agree with Adam. When Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Mayor Bloomberg, and Rupert Murdoch are all in favor of something—in this case, tougher gun laws—and there's still no chance of it being enacted, you can rest assured that forces other than reason and partisan politics are involved.

My only quibble with Adam is his use of the singular form: "a belief." Are firearms the only subject on which Americans are, let us say, a little batty? I'm not so sure. Having lived here for almost thirty years, and having been a U.S. citizen for the past five, I am greatly attached to this country and admire many aspects of it enormously. But the dogged persistence of certain American shibboleths has always struck me as somewhat curious. Read more

Sources

• John Cassidy in The New Yorker
• Image: HaveeruOnline

John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995.

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

At Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Aurora, Denver, where nearly 1,500 people gathered to remember parishioner A.J. Boik, who was among the 12 people killed in the Batman massacre, Father Mauricio Bermudez said "We live in a culture that promotes violence." He asked, "What kind of people are we becoming?"

"This is our opportunity to change things, to do something different," said Bermudez.

Father James Martin, says responding to the Aurora Batman massacre by calling on God for help and comfort is not enough: "Simply praying, 'God, never let this happen again' is insufficient for the person who believes that God gave us the intelligence to bring about lasting change," he said.

Martin's opinion piece created an avalanche of comment on Facebook and Twitter. Within hours of posting his opinion he had to shut down comments on his Facebook page and cut off trading tweets on the topic.

Martin says just praying is not enough. He thinks gun control is as much a pro-life issue as is abortion, euthanasia or the death penalty "and programs that provide the poor with the same access to basic human needs as the wealthy."

There is a "consistent ethic of life" that views all these issues as linked, because they are," he says.

Martin believes that pro-life religious people need to consider how it might be made more difficult for people to procure weapons that are not designed for sport or hunting or self-defense. "If one protests against abortion clinics because they facilitate the taking of human life, why not protest against largely unregulated suppliers of firearms because they facilitate the taking of human life as well?"

In Rome on Sunday, Pope Benedict expressed dismay and sadness at the shooting.

"I was deeply shocked by the senseless violence which took place in Aurora, Denver," he said in his regular Sunday Angelus address.

Source

• America Magazine
• Toronto Sun
• USA Today
• USA Today
• TVNZ
• Los Angeles Times
• Image: Los Angeles Times