Colorado, and who’s to blame.

(Image from the Associated Press, published on the New York Times web site.)
Early Friday morning there was a tragedy at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. An idiot walked into a packed movie house during a gunfight scene in the new Batman movie, unloaded tear gas, and started shooting.
12 people dead, 58 (at last count) wounded or otherwise injured.
This happens not far from Littleton, where another infamous shooting occurred at Columbine High School.
He had died his hair orange and told police when he was arrested that he was the Joker. And he was in the process of dropping out of his Ph.D. program.
I’m a regular reader of news parody site The Onion, and of course no time was wasted in posting a “parody” article about what will happen in the aftermath of such an event. The sad thing is, although it’s published as parody, there is actually an awful lot of truth to the article.
Equally sad, and perhaps more tragic, is that over the coming days we will see a lot of blame being thrown around. People will blame the gun manufacturers for producing such lethal weapons. Another group will blame the video game industry for producing violent video games. Another will blame the movie and television production studios for producing violent and sexually explicit content. Idiots of the religious persuasion will claim it’s God’s punishment in an effort to make themselves look holier than they really are.
Guess who won’t be blamed until much later? The shooter himself. Watch—someone, somewhere, will find some reason why the shooter couldn’t be at fault for his own actions. Everyone and everything will be blamed. Except ourselves.
We’ve long since gone away from a society that believes in personal responsibility for one’s actions. Everything is always someone else’s fault. It was the way we were raised. It was because we didn’t get appropriate psychiatric treatment at the right time. It was because everyone else shunned us or made us outcasts. We live in a nation who’s mantra has become “cover your own ass.” Sometimes external circumstances do drive us to do strange things; please don’t get me wrong on that. But I’m also a firm believer in the idea that life isn’t so much what happens to us as how we respond to what happens to us.
In the end, each individual bears personal responsibility for the way they respond what happens around them. If I screw up, I’m the one at fault, because somewhere along the way, there came a point where I had to make a deliberate choice to go one way or the other, and I chose the wrong way.