I agree with what you’ve written. I am a white woman who lives in and adores Aurora. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I have a black husband and a mixed-race daughter. Aurora is wonderful for mixed-race children. I consider Montbello to be much more the working-class black suburb and Green Valley Ranch to be the upper-middle-class black suburb. Green Valley Ranch is technically part of Denver so it won’t show up in stats as being predominately black but we have friends who live out there. It’s super nice.

Aurora is gloriously multicultural with a significant number of those blacks being African – Ethiopian, Somali, Ghanian etc. Our neighbors are American Indian, Moroccan, white and black. You cannot go five minutes without seeing a muslim woman in a hijab. I love it. I think it’s an over-generalization to call it a black suburb. It’s still 47% white. There is no white flight in progress. It’s a pretty stable ratio – but it’s highly attractive to immigrants bc of our existing mix.

Also, I would say the south used to be mainly white, but that part mostly broke off to become Centennial. Now the whitest parts or those furthest east.

All that aside, I wondered, too, whether that theatre was chosen because of it being a majority black and Latino weekend hangout. I’ve decided that I don’t think that’s the case. If you wanted to shoot up a theater full of blacks the 11:00 showing of a Tyler Perry movie would be a much better bet.

This guy was targeting his own subculture and he certainly knew that fans of Batman aren’t predominately black. I also think that he figured a weird paramilitary outfit was more likely to be overlooked in that particular crowd, than any other.

That theater is the closest to his apartment that has stadium seating and a large auditorium. Stadium seating provided him with easy access to targets and the large auditorium gave him more potential victims.

I am the first too look for racial bias but this on just doesn’t seem to have any to find.

The fact that not everyone who carries is an idiot is completely beside the point. As Randy has so helpfully demonstrated, some of them are: and every one is a mortal danger to themselves and others.

With every comment, you make it clear that you’re a dangerous idiot, if nothing worse.

Wow. Both the tragic event you report and the sub-thread that the report set off reduce this notion of “carrying a gun makes you and those around you safer” to the absurdity that it always was.

I think finding a racial component is his decision to hose down a crowded theatre in the dark with a semi-automatic weapon after throwing in a smoke bomb or two is just a bit of a stretch.

No, I never said that, I agree with you on this point, most people dont bother to seek any such training, or even to give two seconds thought to what it means to be armed, and unfortunately much of the “Pro-gun” lobby as you pigeon-holed all of us into is complicit by making it TOO easy for people to carry guns, and TOO lenient when their actions cause harm.

Nowhere in anything i said did i imply that they have a legal obligation to seek training…but I believe they do have that obligation whether or not they choose to fulfill it. Which brings me back to my comment about anyone who kills my loved ones by firing indiscriminately. We dont have to agree on all the points my friend, But i dont think we are as far apart on this as you imagine. Can you honestly tell me that a responsible, trained gun packer in that theater would have caused a worse outcome than what we ended up with? I think even in your worst nightmares about gun carriers overreacting it wouldnt have ended as badly as this did…in a theater full of people who were completely unarmed.

No, but you seem to think that some sort of sense and high skill level with their weapons is innate to gun owners. You keep implying the entirely unevidenced opposite.

The “firing wildly” implication covers what usually happens. Even if not completely wild, most gun owners aren’t as good as they think they are.

It is the responsibility of anyone who carries ANY weapon to learn how to use it and be ready to use it properly.

No it isn’t, and the law in most places makes no bones about it. Especially states with no-permit concealed carry. Any moron can walk around with a gun. Some of these people don’t even know how to hold the damned things. (Which Congresscritter was that who waved her chromed oversize revolver (with a fucking laser site on it) in a journalist’s face to show off how cool it was?)

anyone who doesnt is more danger than any percieved threat

Uh, yeah. I think that was the point. That’s most gun owners, in an environment where pretty much anyone can own a gun and/or carry it in public.

What is it with the pro-gun/no controls lobby that seems to think that all other people who own guns have their own two brain cells to bub together? Even smarter, responsible gun owners seem to think this way. And the number of people with real training in how to operate in public, in a firefight situation, is effectively zero. Cops fuck this up all the time.

We don’t care how highly you think of yourself or other gun owners, we have zero reason to trust you this way.

How I long for the days when “home defense” is the “reason” for owning. (Even if you’re good, what happens when that bullet goes right through an intruder and the paper thin walls of modern houses/apartments into the sleeping infant next door?)

What if all those people in the theater carried guns? Yeah, what if they are all current SWAT team members. Who were already set up and waiting for something to happen. You might have a case. Even when gun ownership was completely wild and free in this country, it didn’t mean shit to criminals and killers.

Do you honestly think firing blindly and indiscriminately is the only way to employ a firearm? THATS brilliant!