Another in the endless mass shootings in USA - this time Denver

[Peter Lemkin]

By Wayne Madsen

Posted: July 23, 2012

WayneMadsenReport.com

WASHINGTON -- James Holmes, the 24-year old suspect in the mass shooting of Batman "The Dark Knight Rises" movie goers in Aurora, Colorado that left 12 people dead and 58 injured, has had a number of links to U.S. government-funded research centers. Holmes's past association with government research projects has prompted police and federal law enforcement officials to order laboratories and schools with which Holmes has had a past association not to talk to the press about Holmes.

Holmes was one of six recipients of a National Institutes of Health Neuroscience Training Grant at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver. Holmes is a graduate of the University of California at Riverside with a Bachelor of Science degree in neuroscience. Although Holmes dropped out of the PhD neuroscience program at Anschutz in June, police evacuated two buildings at the Anschutz center after the massacre at the Aurora movie theater. Holmes reportedly gave a presentation at the Anschutz campus in May on Micro DNA Biomarkers in a class titled "Biological Basis of Psychiatric and Neurological Disorders."

Initial reports of Holmes having an accomplice in the theater shooting have been discounted by the Aurora police. However, no explanation has been given by police why the Anschutz campus buildings were evacuated after Holmes was already in custody in the Arapahoe County jail.

The Anschutz Medical Campus is on the recently de-commissioned site of the U.S. Army's Fitzsimons Army Medical Center and is named after Philip Anschutz, the billionaire Christian fundamentalist oil and railroad tycoon who also owns The Examiner newspaper chain and website and the neo-conservative Weekly Standard. The Anschutz Medical Campus was built by a $91 million grant from the Anschutz Foundation.

In 2006, at the age of 18, Holmes served as a research intern at the Salk Institute at the University of California at San Diego in La Jolla. It is noteworthy that for the previous two years before Holmes worked at the Salk Institute, the research center was partnered with the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Columbia University, University of California at San Francisco, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Wake Forest University, and the Mars Company (the manufacturers of Milky Way and Snickers bars) to prevent fatigue in combat troops through the enhanced use of epicatechina, a blood flow-increasing and blood vessel-dilating anti-oxidant flavanol found in cocoa and, particularly, in dark chocolate.

The research was part of a larger DARPA program known as the "Peak Soldier Performance Program," which involved creating brain-machine interfaces for battlefield use, including human-robotic bionics for legs, arms, and eyes. DARPA works closely with the Defense Science Office on projects that include the medical research community. Fitzsimons was at the forefront of DARPA research on the use of brain-connected "neuroprosthetic" limbs forsoldiers amputated or paralyzed in combat.

According to his LinkedIn profile, James Holmes's father, Dr. Robert Holmes, who received a PhD in Statistics in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley, worked for San Diego-based HNC Software, Inc. from 2000 to 2002. HNC, known as a "neural network" company, and DARPA, beginning in 1998, have worked on developing "cortronic neural networks," which would allow machines to interpret aural and visual stimuli to think like humans. The cortronic concept was developed by HNC Software's chief scientist and co-founder, Robert Hecht-Nielsen. HNC merged with the Minneapolis-based Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO), a computer analysis and decision-making company. Robert Holmes continues to work at FICO.

It has also emerged that Holmes, when he was 20, worked as a camp counselor at Camp Max Straus of the Jewish Big Brothers and Sister of Los Angeles. According to the Jewish Journal, among other tasks, Holmes helped to teach boys between the ages of 7 to 10 archery. In another unusual detail, the car Holmes used to drive to the Aurora movie theater had Tennessee plates. Holmes is originally from San Diego.

James Holmes is the grandson of Lt. Col. Robert Holmes, one of the first Turkish language graduates of the Army Language School, later the Defense Language Institute, in Monterey, California. Graduating from the Turkish language class in 1948, Holmes spent a career in the Army, which likely included more than a few intelligence-related assignments. Typically, U.S. military officers conversant in Turkish served with either the Defense Intelligence Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency at either the U.S. embassy in Ankara or the Consulate General in Istanbul, or both.

Terrence Sejnowski, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, in an interview with Cognitive Science Online in 2008, had the following comment about recent studies of the human brain: "Alan Newell [cognitive psychology researcher at the intelligence community-linked RAND Corporation] once said that when AI [artificial intelligence] was founded not enough was known about the brain to be of any help and in the early 1980s, symbol processing was the only game in town. That has changed and we now know a lot about the brain, perhaps more than we need to know [emphasis added]."

More than we need to know!

The links between the younger and elder Holmes and U.S. government research on creating super-soldiers, human brain-machine interfaces, and human-like robots beg the question: "Was James Holmes engaged in a real-life Jason Bourne TREADSTONE project that broke down and resulted in deadly consequences in Aurora, Colorado?" In any event, if the Batman movies are now serving as a newer version of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye subliminal messaging triggering mechanism, -- Salinger's novel was of interest to a number of American political assassins -- keep in mind that August 10 is the opening date of The Bourne Legacy. It may be wise to skip that film in the theater for a while.

[Keith Millea]

A former classmate from the University of Colorado suggested another cause for the killings, describing Holmes as someone who had lost touch with reality after becoming 'obsessed' with video games.

The classmate told the Daily Mail: 'James was obsessed with computer games and was always playing role-playing games.

'I can't remember which one but it was something like World of Warcraft, one of those where you compete against people on the internet.

'He did not have much of a life apart from that and doing his work. James seemed like he wanted to be in the game and be one of the characters.

'It seemed that being online was more important to him than real life. He must have lost his sense of reality, how else can you shoot dozens of people you don't know?'

It is also believed that Holmes was due to be evicted from his flat. He may also have just broken up with a woman - but these seems sketchy at this point.

This is what I keep coming back to.I know a few young teens who play these online games,and they are totally addicted.These kids will claim to be sick so they don't have to go to school,just so they can stay home and keep playing.They get all excited and angry while playing because of the emotional attachment to the game.I get the feeling that these games are indeed having some negative effect on the psych of those who play them regularly.

[Adele Edisen]

I posted a video titled "Conspiratus Ubiquitus" on the forum for Videos and Photographs:


https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...#post56451


It is about 1-1/2 hours long and deals with many assassinations of the past and the methods used
to create killers and patsies.

It may have relevancy to the recent situation in Colorado.

Adele

[Adele Edisen]

In watching the videos and still-shots of the suspect, James Holmes, in the courtroom yesterday, my first thought was that he was under the influence of sedation or drugs of some kind. He appeared to be nodding off at times, and then jerking to some kind of attention very briefly. He could be under hypnotic suggestion and control by someone else, or even under self-induced hypnosis. Yes, people, can induce hypnotic states upon themselves, even unconsciously under stress. Milton Erickson, M.D., expert clinical hypnotist, who used hypnosis to treat many of his patients frequently hypnotized himself and even taught his patients to do it.

The suspect appears "not to be there" in his demeanor of inattentiveness.

Others have mentioned these things as well.

I, too, wondered who called him at the theater. Also, the difference in heights reported of the shooter and the person who answered his phone before going to the fire exit door, if true.
And the gas mask found far away from the fire exit door near the suspect's car, under a security surveillance camera.

Another doppelganger situation?

Adele

[Peter Lemkin]

A former classmate from the University of Colorado suggested another cause for the killings, describing Holmes as someone who had lost touch with reality after becoming 'obsessed' with video games.

The classmate told the Daily Mail: 'James was obsessed with computer games and was always playing role-playing games.

'I can't remember which one but it was something like World of Warcraft, one of those where you compete against people on the internet.

'He did not have much of a life apart from that and doing his work. James seemed like he wanted to be in the game and be one of the characters.

'It seemed that being online was more important to him than real life. He must have lost his sense of reality, how else can you shoot dozens of people you don't know?'

It is also believed that Holmes was due to be evicted from his flat. He may also have just broken up with a woman - but these seems sketchy at this point.

This is what I keep coming back to.I know a few young teens who play these online games,and they are totally addicted.These kids will claim to be sick so they don't have to go to school,just so they can stay home and keep playing.They get all excited and angry while playing because of the emotional attachment to the game.I get the feeling that these games are indeed having some negative effect on the psych of those who play them regularly.

I don't have any quibble with what you say....but note that it may have been World of Warcraft [which Brievik played - or something similar. I begin to wonder if 1] persons who play these games become both zombieized and desensitized to killing and 2] if those who are behind mind control can use these games and those addicted to them to create chosen 'killers' under mind-control for deep political purposes.....and have.

[Jan Klimkowski]

I don't believe it's World of Warcraft per se. I do believe it would be very easy for a deep black shrink to remotely access the game being played by a person of interest (a test subject if you will) and write a special script just for that person.

Consider the following.

When remote tribes are first shown images on a cinema screen, they want to run from the horses charging towards them, and often feel as if they are watching the imagery, the mythology, seen during rites of passage - such as hallucinogen-induced trips to meet the guardian angels and malevolent spirits.

Whereas in the so-called developed world, we have become accustomed to the cinema or TV as a passive viewing experience, which cannot hurt us physically.

We sit and watch the screen, occasionally jumping in excitement or weeping in sympathy.

Computer games are far more active than the cinema or TV. You are the protagonist. You make the choices as you creep along the wall or crawl through the sewer to your target.

It is inevitable that this transition from passive viewer of the fictional world to active participant in the fantasy world will produce consequences in human behaviour.

The precise nature of those consequences are currently unknown outside of covert science.

However, we do know that if you are playing the Joker in a computer game, and kill ten people and then get killed, you just reload the game and play it again Jack.

Starting all over with a reload is not an option available in real life.

For certain individuals with genuine psychological disorders, such as the psychopaths and megalomaniacs who serve as CEOs in our major corporations, the blurring of fantasy and reality is likely to have entirely malign consequences.

For a bright young guy like James Holmes, the blurring could hypothetically lead to his acting out a computer game fantasy for real.

However, his background is so suspicious that there are many other possibilities.

The dream of the mind control doctors has always been clear in their moniker: they want to control minds.

The known means of doing this has long been by planting certain narratives and triggers in the subconscious mind, and then exploiting these narratives and triggers for malevolent purposes.

The technical ability to control mental states will cetainly have developed. However, that does not mean the basic patsy MO has necessarily changed.

Every false flag needs its carefully crafted legend.

Was Holmes simply lost in the borderland between virtual reality and real blood and gore?

Possibly.

Was Holmes cast and crafted by spooky C21st witchdoctors as the Joker, and triggered to take the fall for a pre-planned atrocity?

Possibly.

[Lauren Johnson]

Computer games are far more active than the cinema or TV. You are the protagonist. You make the choices as you creep along the wall or crawl through the sewer to your target.

I am not a gamer. But I know a couple of teens with 3 huge monitors giving full 180 degree 3d views with surround 5.1 sound. Talk about creepy.

Secondly, how would I hijack a mind? Assume an online game. Make sure that the target has ingested a drug cocktail that makes him more suggestible, loosens his grasp on reality. Insert an avatar in the game that meets Holmes' avatar. Holmes is hypnotized through the avatar. The game is his reality. Manipulate the game to create the necessary internal narrative. As long as he is The Joker (in the game), then he receives instructions to shoot up a theater.

BTW, I highly recommend Daniel Suarez' Daemon and Freedom. Synopsis: Gaming genius Matthew Sobol, the 34-year-old head of CyberStorm Entertainment, has just died of brain cancer, but death doesn't stop him from initiating an all-out Internet war against humanity. When the authorities investigate Sobol's mansion in Thousand Oaks, Calif., they find themselves under attack from his empty house, aided by an unmanned Hummer that tears into the cops with staggering ferocity. Sobol's weapon is a daemon, a kind of computer process that not only has taken over many of the world's computer systems but also enlists the help of superintelligent human henchmen willing to carry out his diabolical plan. Complicated jargon abounds, but most complexities are reasonably explained. A final twist that runs counter to expectations will leave readers anxiously awaiting the promised sequel.

[Ed Jewett]

Largest mass shooting in US history? Try three massacres on Native Americans

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Carl Herman
The US government committed the largest mass shootings in national history by opening fire on peaceful families of children, the elderly, women, and men at Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, and Bloody Island. These followed repeated US treaty violations to remove Native Americans by armed military force from their lands.
Each mass shooting killed about 150 innocent people.
But the US government also averages war-murdering 500 human beings every day since 2001.
This is relatively good news because the average since 1945 is 1,000 to 1,500 every day.This totals to 20-30 million since war law made armed attack by military unlawful.
Corporate media is lying in commission and omission when they claim the recent event is the "largest mass shooting in US history."
Had enough of these psychopath 1% liars in corporate media, government, and finance?
Demand their arrests. War-murder and lying about it is a good place to start the criminal argument.


Posted in General | 5 Comments

[Ed Jewett]

Storytelling in new media: The case of alternate reality games

"There is a great deal of debate about how to define the term "alternate reality game" and what should be included or excluded by the definition. Sean Stacey, founder of the website Unfiction, has suggested that the best way to define the genre was not to define it, and instead locate each game on three axes (ruleset, authorship and coherence) in a sphere of "chaotic fiction" that would include works such as the Uncyclopedia and street games like SF0 as well.[2] If one accepts noted game designer Chris Crawford's definition of a game (it requires that there is an opponent), then ARGs are perhaps better understood as puzzles. However, if the puppetmasters are actively changing the game while it is going on (as happened with The Beast), then the ARG does more closely fit the definition of a game."

"Among the terms essential to understand discussions about ARGs are:

Puppetmaster- A puppetmaster or "PM" is an individual involved in designing and/or running an ARG. Puppetmasters are simultaneously allies and adversaries to the player base, creating obstacles and providing resources for overcoming them in the course of telling the game's story. Puppetmasters generally remain behind the curtain while a game is running. The real identity of puppet masters may or may not be known ahead of time.

The Curtain - The curtain is generally a metaphor for the separation between the puppetmasters and the players. This can take the traditional form of absolute secrecy regarding the puppetmasters' identities and involvement with the production, or refer merely to the convention that puppetmasters do not communicate directly with players through the game, interacting instead through the characters and the game's design.

Rabbithole - Also known as a Trailhead. A Rabbithole marks the first website, contact, or puzzle that starts off the ARG.

Trailhead - A deliberate clue which enables a player to discover a way into the game. Most ARGs employ a number of trailheads in several media, to maximise the probability of people discovering the game. Some trailheads may be covert, others may be thinly-disguised adverts.

This Is Not A Game (TINAG) - Setting the ARG form apart from other games is the This Is Not A Game aesthetic, which dictates that the game not behave like a game: phone numbers mentioned in the ARG, for example, should actually work, and the game should not provide an overtly-designated playspace or ruleset to the players."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

**

The WikiPedia article also describes:

--Similarities and differences to other forms of entertainment
--Influences and precursors
--Basic design principles of ARGs (important reading)

See also the sections on
--grassroots development
--community development
--commercial games
--the self-supporting ARG
--the serious ARG
--new developments
--TV tie-ins and "Extended Experiences"

The WikiPedia article lists as over 60 linked or downloadable references:

McGonigal, Jane (2003), "A Real Little Game: The Performance of Belief in Pervasive Play" (PDF), Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) "Level Up" Conference Proceedings

"A Conspiracy of Conspiracy Gamers". WIRED. 2001-09-19. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46672,00.html. Retrieved on 2007-02-19.


***



"Anyone interested in developing an Alternate Reality Game in London/other sites in UK. The game is based in a near future, dystopian society. A small group of individuals resist a sinister multinational corporation that aims to control the entire population. The game is influenced by various works, including 'The Crying of Lot 49' by Thomas Pynchon, 'The Traveler' by John Twelve Hawks and 'The Prisoner' TV series with Patrick McGoohan. The game is in the early stages of development. If interested in getting involved, please get in touch by joining www.wespeakforfreedom ".

***

http://www.argn.com/ The ARG network

****

First Monday
http://firstmonday.org/

First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peerreviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. A lead article in the latest issue is

Storytelling in new media: The case of alternate reality games, 20012009
by Jeffrey Kim, Elan Lee, Timothy Thomas, and Caroline Dombrowski
First Monday, Volume 14, Number 6 - 1 June 2009

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/i.../view/2484/2199


Some of the references:

Helena Cole and Mark Griffiths, 2007. "Social interactions in massively multiplayer online roleplaying gamers," CyberPsychology and Behavior, volume 10, number 4, pp. 575583.

GDA (International Game Developer's Association), 2006. "2006 alternate reality games white paper," athttp://www.igda.org/arg/resources/IGDA-Alt...epaper-2006.pdf, accessed 25 February 2009.

Nick Iuppa and Terry Borst, 2006. Story and simulations for serious games: Tales from the trenches. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Henry Jenkins, 2004. "Chasing bees, without the hive mind," MIT Technology Review (3 December), athttp://www.technologyreview.com/, accessed 25 February 2009.

Henry Jenkins, Ravi Purushotma, Katherine Clinton, Margaret Weigel and Alice Robison, 2006. "Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century," Project New Media Literacies, athttp://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/wo...LWhitePaper.pdf, accessed 25 February 2009.

Jeffrey Kim and John King, 2004. "Managing knowledge work: Specialization and collaboration of engineering problem," Journal of Knowledge Management, volume 8, number 2, pp. 5363.

Jeffrey Kim, Jonathan P. Allen, and Elan Lee, 2008. "Alternate reality gaming," Communications of the ACM, volume 51, number 2, pp. 3642.

Andrew Losowsky, 2003 "Puppet masters," Guardian (11 December), at http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,481...-110837,00.html, accessed 25 February 2009.

Alexander MacGill, 2008. "Adults and video games," Pew Internet & American Life Project (7 December), athttp://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/269/report_display.asp, accessed 25 February 2009.

Jane McGonigal, 2008. "Saving the world through game design: Stories from the near future," 2008 New Yorker Conference, athttp://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conf.../2008/mcgonigal, accessed 25 February 2009.

N. Nova, T. Wehrle, J. Goslin, Y. Bourquin, and P. Dillenbourg, 2007. "Collaboration in a multiuser game: Impacts of an awareness tool on mutual modeling," Multimedia Tools and Applications, volume 32, number 2 (February), pp. 161183.

Shintaro Okazaki, Radoslav Skapa and Ildefonso Grande, 2008, "Capturing global youth: Mobile gaming in the U.S., Spain, and the Czech Republic," Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, volume 13, number 4, pp. 827855.

Tasmin Osborne, 2003. "The virtual battle of the sexes," BBC News, Technology (23 December), athttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7796482.stm, accessed 18 May 2009.

D.D. Pennington, 2008. "Crossdisciplinary collaboration and learning," Ecology and Society volume 13, number 2, athttp://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol13/iss2/art8/, accessed 18 May 2009.

Frank Rose, 2007. "Secret Websites, coded messages: The new world of immersive games," Wired volume 16, number 1, athttp://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/m...e/16-01/ff_args, accessed 25 February 2009.

Sean Stewart, 2008. "Alternate reality games," at http://www.seanstewart.org/interactive/args/, accessed 25 February 2009.

Wikipedia, "Alternate reality games," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game, accessed 25 February 2009.

Dmitri Williams, Nick Yee, and Scott Caplan, 2008. "Who plays, how much, and why?

Debunking the stereotypical gamer profile," Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, volume 13, number 4, pp. 9931018.

About the authors:

Jeffrey Kim, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institute for National Security Education and Research at the Information School of the University of Washington.

Elan Lee is one of the foremost Alternate Reality Game designers and founder of Fourth Wall Studios.

Timothy Thomas is a CIA Officer in Residence at the University of Washington.

Caroline Dombrowski is a Research Project Manager at the University of Washington.


The last three sentences: " The next few years will reveal if industries outside of gaming and marketing can use the same principles to harness the intellect and drive of wide groups of people. The rise of "serious" games, such as World Without Oil, demonstrates the growing desire to do just that (McGonigal, 2008). As participation and information sharing increases, the special case of ARGs indicates a potential path towards changing the world. "

**





***

Tutorial for playing Alternate Reality Games

http://www.unfiction.com/dev/tutorial/


******

http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/.a/6a0...8789e970c-800wi


************************************************************

"That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued.

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

And while you're studying that reality judiciously, as you will we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.

We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' "

************************************************************



"Obama Ads Appear in Video Game"
By DAVE ITZKOFF

"Video gamers who have recently played the racing game Burnout Paradise may find it offers more than a high-speed driving simulation: advertisements for Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign, above, have begun appearing in the game. Players of Burnout Paradise who are connected to the Internet are also connected to an in-game system that allows real-life sponsors to place advertisements on billboards and other surfaces in its digital world. Jeff Brown, vice president of communications at Electronic Arts, which publishes Burnout Paradise, said Mr. Obama's campaign had purchased ads to run in the Xbox 360 version of the game, which he said is most popular among male players ages 16 to 30. The ads will run until Nov. 3 in 10 battleground states. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/arts/15a...2.html?ref=arts

***



Another Version of the Truth
from the US Bureau of Morality

***




Aftershock, run by the Institute for the Future
[ http://www.iftf.org/ ] [in Palo Alto, CA] and Art Center College of Design, is based on a 300-page U.S. Geological Survey scenario report that details the extensive damage that Southern California could experience in the aftermath of a 7.8-magnitude quake on the San Andreas Fault. The game began on Thursday and will run for three weeks, prompting users to complete real-world missions and submit content based on them to the gaming community.

"Disaster preparedness was at the point where the messaging had hit the limit. You can give people this really elegantly designed flyer, and they stick it in a drawer and it hits them in the head during the earthquake," said Jason Tester, the lead game designer at the IFTF. "[The game] says, 'You are experiencing a real earthquake.' We're trying to make it feel visceral."

***

Crowdsourcing the future:
Can alternate reality game Superstruct help save the world?
Dan Kaplan
September 29th, 2008

The year is 2019. Respiratory Distress Syndrome, or REDS, has appeared in Stockholm, the first city outside of the tropics to see a case. The disease is known to overwhelm local health resources everywhere it goes, and news of health insurance companies going belly up has become routine. Word is spreading that in the absence of effective governmental responses, ad hoc militias have been forming to forcibly quarantine infected populations around the globe.

On its own, REDS sounds like a major disaster, but it is not the kind of thing that could put an end to the world. But in Superstruct, a large-scale online game put on by the Institute for the Future, REDS is merely one of five independent "superthreats" coming to a head in 2019. The others involve 250 million climate change refugees, the steady breakdown of the global food supply, increasingly brazen attacks on the world's cyber infrastructure and the rising international tensions surrounding the world's failure to agree on standards for renewable energy.
Taken together, these five threats pose a catastrophic risk to the human species.

The game forecasts that humans will be wiped out by 2042. The point of Superstruct, which anyone can begin playing on October 6, is to work together with fellow players and find brilliant ways to avert this fate.

More here:

http://venturebeat.com/2008/09/29/crowdsou...save-the-world/


The Institute for the Future created Superstruct because it suspects that without cooperation on a worldwide scale, the crises of the medium-term future could collectively obliterate everything our species has achieved.





The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is based in California's Silicon Valley, in a community at the crossroads of technological innovation, social experimentation, and global interchange. Founded in 1968 by a group of former RAND Corporation researchers with a grant from the Ford Foundation to take leading-edge research methodologies into the public and business sectors, the IFTF is committed to building the future.


http://s7.zetaboards.com/E_Pluribus_Unum...8&t=877292

[Adele Edisen]

Tue, July 24, 2012 7:22:23 PM
It's the Guns -- But We All Know, It's Not Really the Guns ...a note from Michael Moore
From: Michael Moore <maillist@michaelmoore.com>

It's the Guns But We All Know, It's Not Really the Guns... a note from Michael Moore

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

ALERT: Michael Moore will appear this evening on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight to discuss the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting and where we go from here. Tune in at 9:00 PM ET/6:00 PM PT (replay 12:00 Midnight ET/9:00 PM PT and 3:00 AM ET/12:00 Midnight PT).

Friends,

Since Cain went nuts and whacked Abel, there have always been those humans who, for one reason or another, go temporarily or permanently insane and commit unspeakable acts of violence. There was the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who during the first century A.D. enjoyed throwing victims off a cliff on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Gilles de Rais, a French knight and ally of Joan of Arc during the middle ages, went cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs one day and ended up murdering hundreds of children. Just a few decades later Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, was killing people in Transylvania in numberless horrifying ways.

In modern times, nearly every nation has had a psychopath or two commit a mass murder, regardless of how strict their gun laws are the crazed white supremacist in Norway one year ago Sunday, the schoolyard butcher in Dunblane, Scotland, the École Polytechnique killer in Montreal, the mass murderer in Erfurt, Germany … the list seems endless.

And now the Aurora shooter last Friday. There have always been insane people, and there always will be.

But here's the difference between the rest of the world and us: We have TWO Auroras that take place every single day of every single year! At least 24 Americans every day (8-9,000 a year) are killed by people with guns and that doesn't count the ones accidentally killed by guns or who commit suicide with a gun. Count them and you can triple that number to over 25,000.

That means the United States is responsible for over 80% of all the gun deaths in the 23 richest countries combined. Considering that the people of those countries, as human beings, are no better or worse than any of us, well, then, why us?

Both conservatives and liberals in America operate with firmly held beliefs as to "the why" of this problem. And the reason neither can find their way out of the box toward a real solution is because, in fact, they're both half right.

The right believes that the Founding Fathers, through some sort of divine decree, have guaranteed them the absolute right to own as many guns as they desire. And they will ceaselessly remind you that a gun cannot fire itself that "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

Of course, they know they're being intellectually dishonest (if I can use that word) when they say that about the Second Amendment because they know the men who wrote the constitution just wanted to make sure a militia could be quickly called up from amongst the farmers and merchants should the Brits decide to return and wreak some havoc.

But they are half right when they say "Guns don't kill people." I would just alter that slogan slightly to speak the real truth: "Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people."

Because we're the only ones in the first world who do this en masse. And you'll hear all stripes of Americans come up with a host of reasons so that they don't have to deal with what's really behind all this murder and mayhem.

They'll say it's the violent movies and video games that are responsible. Last time I checked, the movies and video games in Japan are more violent than ours and yet usually fewer than 20 people a year are killed there with guns and in 2006 the number was two!

Others will say it's the number of broken homes that lead to all this killing. I hate to break this to you, but there are almost as many single-parent homes in the U.K. as there are here and yet, in Great Britain, there are usually fewer than 40 gun murders a year.

People like me will say this is all the result of the U.S. having a history and a culture of men with guns, "cowboys and Indians," "shoot first and ask questions later." And while it is true that the mass genocide of the Native Americans set a pretty ugly model to found a country on, I think it's safe to say we're not the only ones with a violent past or a penchant for genocide. Hello, Germany! That's right I'm talking about you and your history, from the Huns to the Nazis, just loving a good slaughter (as did the Japanese, and the British who ruled the world for hundreds of years and they didn't achieve that through planting daisies). And yet in Germany, a nation of 80 million people, there are only around 200 gun murders a year.

So those countries (and many others) are just like us except for the fact that more people here believe in God and go to church than any other Western nation.

My liberal compatriots will tell you if we just had less guns, there would be less gun deaths. And, mathematically, that would be true. If you have less arsenic in the water supply, it will kill less people. Less of anything bad calories, smoking, reality TV will kill far fewer people. And if we had strong gun laws that prohibited automatic and semi-automatic weapons and banned the sale of large magazines that can hold a gazillion bullets, well, then shooters like the man in Aurora would not be able to shoot so many people in just a few minutes.

But this, too, has a problem. There are plenty of guns in Canada (mostly hunting rifles) and yet the annual gun murder count in Canada is around 200 deaths. In fact, because of its proximity, Canada's culture is very similar to ours the kids play the same violent video games, watch the same movies and TV shows, and yet they don't grow up wanting to kill each other. Switzerland has the third-highest number of guns per capita on earth, but still a low murder rate.

So why us?

I posed this question a decade ago in my film 'Bowling for Columbine,' and this week, I have had little to say because I feel I said what I had to say ten years ago and it doesn't seem to have done a whole lot of good other than to now look like it was actually a crystal ball posing as a movie.

This is what I said then, and it is what I will say again today:

1. We Americans are incredibly good killers. We believe in killing as a way of accomplishing our goals. Three-quarters of our states execute criminals, even though the states with the lower murder rates are generally the states with no death penalty.

Our killing is not just historical (the slaughter of Indians and slaves and each other in a "civil" war). It is our current way of resolving whatever it is we're afraid of. It's invasion as foreign policy. Sure there's Iraq and Afghanistan but we've been invaders since we "conquered the wild west" and now we're hooked so bad we don't even know where to invade (bin Laden wasn't hiding in Afghanistan, he was in Pakistan) or what to invade for (Saddam had zero weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with 9/11). We send our lower classes off to do the killing, and the rest of us who don't have a loved one over there don't spend a single minute of any given day thinking about the carnage. And now we send in remote pilotless planes to kill, planes that are being controlled by faceless men in a lush, air conditioned studio in suburban Las Vegas. It is madness.

2. We are an easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think is going to hurt us? Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, #1 in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated, frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer. Maybe we would take better care of each other (here's a good example of what I mean).

Those are my thoughts about Aurora and the violent country I am a citizen of. Like I said, I spelled it all out here if you'd like to watch it or share it for free with others. All we're lacking here, my friends, is the courage and the resolve. I'm in if you are.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@MichaelMoore.com
@MMFlint
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. Don't forget to watch Piers tonight on CNN. I just taped it and it was a very good show.

Adele