The brutality of Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City became horrifyingly real during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado as a gunman burst into the theater and murdered at least 12 people. And at least some in the theater initially thought the incident was part of the show.
While information about the massacre is still sketchy, early reports indicate that a man wearing a gas mask and body armor and carrying a rifle burst into the ninth theater at the Central 16 cineplex in the Denver suburb. He threw what witnesses described as a gas canister before beginning a shooting spree that wounded about 50 people — at least 12 fatally.
“We were just watching the movie and up to the right it sounded liked some firecrackers went off,” Zachary Golditch, who was seeing the movie in the nearby Theater 8, told local TV news. Golditch was shot in the neck, “a clear in and out wound,” as the chaos spread to theater eight.
Another moviegoer in Theater 8, Alex Milano, told a reporter that “loud bangs and smoke took over the right of the theater.” Before he realized he was under attack, Milano said he and a friend thought, “Special effects, midnight showing, that’s awesome, what theater does that anymore.” But when he saw “something come through the wall, multiple objects flow through the wall,” he dropped his younger sister and himself to the ground and spirited them out of the movie.
Police announced that they have a 24-year old man in custody, named James Holmes. His motives are as yet unknown — but became the subject of quick, rash speculation on the Twitter hashtag #aurorashooting, where people used the tragedy to promote their agendas on everything from gun control to counterterrorism. Twitter became a portal into the tragedy, as cellphone videos filmed from the theater circulated alongside outpourings of support for the victims and rage at the crime. The social-media fracas even prompted an area man who shares a name with the suspect to compose a Facebook post explaining, “I am not a 24-year old gun-slinging killer.”
While fears of sophisticated domestic terrorism have circulated since 9/11 — Nolan plays off them in his Batman trilogy — most mass killings in the United States still typically rely on a single individual or small group of people using assault weapons. From the Littleton Colorado shootings of 1999; to the D.C. area sniper rampage of 2002; to the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007; to Maj. Nidal Hassan’s Fort Hood attack in 2009; to the movie theater in Aurora, this pattern has held. The “complex attacks” familiar to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan — so-called because they combine insurgent tactics, such as homemade bomb explosions with small-arms or rocket fire — have still not migrated back to the United States.
Sophisticated terrorist attacks like 9/11, where multiple teams of terrorists synchronize an assault, remain the exception, not the rule. It’s notable as well that the homegrown attacks encouraged by the web magazine of al-Qaida’s Yemen offshoot are more grandiose than killing moviegoers; none have manifested yet.
The U.S. Army, concerned over speculation that the shooter might have been a veteran — and eager to stifle the meme of the psychotic veteran before it spread — felt compelled to email that a database check of the suspect resulted in “no evidence suggest[ing] this individual served in the Army.”
Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film is based in part on the 1993 comic-book saga “Knightfall,” in which the psychopathic villain Bane subjects Gotham City to a campaign of seemingly random violent crime as a plot to lure out and cripple an exhausted Batman. In Aurora, the story came far too close to reality.
