<p> The cover of last week's <em>Entertainment Weekly </em>crowed “Batman's Killer Finale,” but no one counted on anyone taking the headline literally. But early morning on July 20 during the midnight screening of <em>The Dark Knight Rises</em>, a masked man burst into a suburban Denver theater lobbing gas grenades and firing automatic weapons. It was carnage straight from Hollywood and resulted in 12 dead, 58 injured. </p> <p>The question is inescapable: Is there a link between the actions of the suspect, James Holmes, and the Dark Knight movies? Reportedly, Holmes identified himself with the Joker, and even if this is rumor, his deeds resemble the berserker tactics of Heath Ledger's Joker from <em>The Dark Knight</em>. Of course, the easy answer is that millions saw that movie and to date, only one disturbed young man emulated them, his anti-social madness taking the garb of a particular supervillain when he decided to act out. </p> <p>But to some degree we are what we consume, and in a society that has chosen moving images of mass destruction as entertainment, there can never be a definitive answer to cause and effect. People went nuts long before video games and computer-generated mass destruction on screen, but is insanity assuming fantastic new forms? By early reports, Holmes was a bookish honor student, never in trouble, an introvert (is that being castigated by the media as mental illness?) yet also part of a generation graduating from college with expensive degrees and slender prospects. Ironically, he majored in neuro-psychology and presented a paper on the “biological basis of psychiatric and neurological disorders.” Perhaps mental illness is a genetic predisposition, but environment is a trigger. </p> <p>And speaking of triggers, in a society with less permissive attitudes toward owning weapons, Holmes' fury might have erupted the old fashioned wayin a bar fight. Somebody might have gotten hurt, even in the old America where revolvers and hunting rifles were easily available and no one worried about it. But 12 dead, 58 wounded in a movie theater? The founders of our republic didn't imagine the sort of arsenal Holmes purchased legally from Denver gun dealers. The media will tut-tut for a few days over violence in the movies but will it editorialize about allowing military-level weapons in private hands? </p>
