Should be we surprised by this?

Another day of buzz on the interwebs. This one is a true tragedy; the shooting in Aurora, CO at a midnight showing of the new Batman movie.

It is so terribly hard to make sense of such a senseless act, until you start to wonder how senseless it really is. When we live in a society that, for all intents and purposes, extols the virtues of violence, should we feel shocked when all that is offered as entertainment comes to life?

A line from an article on boston.com jumped out at me: "...maybe it’s worth having a discussion about an entertainment culture that excels at selling violent power fantasies to people who feel powerless." I don't think the violence is limited to power fantasies aimed at the powerless.

It is everywhere from the myriad police-based shows, shows about the mafia or forensics, kids cartoons can be violent, even, frankly, the evening news shows violence. Violence isn't limited to television either. Murder Mystery books are prevalent too. Whether it is Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson, Faye Kellerman, Sara Paretsky, there probably is seldom a time when a book about violence isn't on the New York Times Best Seller List. As of this week, GONE GIRL and BACKFIRE are two that are clearly crime/violence based.

Frankly, the concept of violence extends all the way down to children's clothes. In recent years a trend has emerged of the use of camouflage in boys and girls clothing. For girls, of course it has the ever-present pink added in, but for boys it is straight up camo, like what you see soldiers wearing. Really? People want to dress their infant, toddler, elementary school age boy as though he is a mini-soldier? Ben and I often discuss what it means to sign up for the military and we both agree that a major part of it is that you are signing up to agree to be okay with killing people. It might come as no surprise that I won't be buying any camo gear for either of my children.

How easy is it for someone to obtain a gun in our culture? Pretty freaking easy. Our second amendment give us the right to keep and bear arms and the supreme court has had several cases to debate whether this applies to individuals and many cases come out in favor of people being able to keep guns in their homes. The original intention, I believe, was to allow for militias and for communities to protect themselves. I'm pretty sure the makers of our constitution never fathomed an assault rifle or the number of bullets it could dispense in a matter of minutes.

That we can get an assault rifle to keep in our own homes seems just so unnecessary. To what end does an average individual need an assault rifle? While I would personally never own a gun, if you are a hunter you would have one or if you are a sportsman you would have one. But in neither case would an assault rifle be your weapon of choice. They are meant for nothing else than killing as many people in one fell swoop as possible. Its not like you are going to take an assault rifle out into the woods hoping to stumble upon a herd of deer and just fire away.

But, I bet we see images of assault rifles all over movies and television. We might even read about the carnage they create in a book or in a story covering unrest in any number of foreign countries. I would argue that the supreme court needs to re-enact the ban on assault rifles it over turned in the 90's. But I might also argue that we as a culture need to start speaking out against the violence that pervades our airways as a way to begin to curb the senseless violence that continues to occur in our society.