I wasn't going to do this. I really thought James Holmes, Aurora Colorado movie theater shooter, was getting too much attention. In the face of all the things that are more deserving of the FBI's attention, such as missing children, why did this creep have to stop taking his thorazine and fulfill his mentally ill ambitions of forcing the rest of us to feel his pain? But after seeing this picture, and the entry on Bent Corner, I was unable to stop myself. Rick talks about the fact that others who commit crimes like this might be prosecuted as terrorists, which is completely true. If our Ronald McDonald wannabe had a darker-than-olive complexion, and spoke with an accent from a faraway, Middle Eastern place, or had friends who practiced Islam, (as opposed to having no friends!) or practiced Islam himself, he would probably be facing slightly different charges than the charges he is facing now. Yet despite a slightly different motive, the crime and the intent are the same. The bias is illogical. But there is one more place I would go with this, before deciding not to give this creep any more attention, and that is this: why do our courts fail and often refuse to hold anyone who has been diagnosed with a serious mental illness accountable for his or her crimes? If someone who has decided that the side affects of his medication are too inconvenient, and therefore stops taking it, exposing the rest of us to the dangers presented by his symptoms, why can't he be placed on a locked ward? Why is that such a problem? Why is it so important that the rest of us understand, as we clean up the crime scenes and bury the victims, that the poor, sick, deranged, mentally ill thugs have merely been "misunderstood"? Ronald McDonald's understudy, here, certainly was misunderstood. His doctor thought it would be okay for him to live outside of the insane asylum.
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