It is difficult for a malfunctioning society to pass laws to correct their drift toward dissipation. The spectacular meltdown of the Aurora Colorado killer-joker is a case in point.
The broadcast media has recovered the 'story' salting 'clues' about the 'suspect' that might explain his behavior. Discovery of behavior causality and motivation is more important for news purposes when the ending is already post hoc. It is at least better than the day of breaking news that the people are beyond a yellow tape and seeking to disarm the 'bombs' within networked with a maze of 'tripwires'.
The 24 year old killer does have subjective knowledge stages written all over his terrible actions that midnight. He used classical tripwires instead of batter-operated motion sensors for his improvised anti-personnel mines as might a modern land-mine warfare improvisor.
One could imagine encounter a smiling bullfrog of death along a trail at 15,000 feet before its solar rechargable batteries powering the motion sensor impulsed a pound of RTX to explode. The youthful apprentice psychiatrist of the top rank of the epistemological relativist ladder went for the soft underbelly of social fantasy with crude yet costly weapons-at least $3000 worth.
We learn that that James (Joker) Holmes was a top of class graduate in neuroscience from The University of California at Riverside. A brilliant kid studying to be a psychiatrist in the post-REM era of social detachment is detached to the Denver area and stuffed with psychological relativism. Evidently he sent a package of why-I-shoot data to his psychiatrist graduate school instructor.
If weapons are restricted more the psychiatrist class and their apprentices would be exempt and given the REM-Boston awards for moral excellence instead.
The post-modernist era of Dewian epistemology can have consequences for the young. It can create moral and philosophical conundrums, alienation and confusion about reality itself. Being stuffed with psychiatric training in the Denver area may have prompted a kind of intellectual nausea for James Holmes in which he could reassert his normalcy by becoming an actor in the fantasy world of Democratic-Republican socialist-corporatist politics that makes a fiction of moral coherence and national sovereignty.
There is a multi-verse ethical theory that speculates that if Universes are made for the entertainment of superior beings the chances of having one's contract renewed to appear is best if one makes a big impression (as in a soap opera or reality T.V. show). In that context being a significant villain such as James the Joker Holmes is a good way to appear in another episode of a recurrent universe-what these kids believe!
President Obama made a speech on the shooting in which he said that AK-47s should be in 'the hands of soldiers rather than criminals'. Apparently he considers civilian ownership of AK-47s criminal. He would further Leninize society and ban AK-47s from the private sector-a legalists solution if there ever was one. So I will write something about an alternative course.
In then late 19th century human innovators and inventors learned how to make mechanism that would permit extraction of a bullet from a chamber, recocking of the trigger mechanism and feeding of another bullets into the chamber. It isn't a brilliant thing and any machine or auto shop or garage mechanic can make his own automatic weapons or automatic shotguns with 50 barrels if he likes that can be used once and perhaps blow up thereafter. It isn't really possible to turn back the historical clock and prevent the manufacture of spears or swords either.
AK-47s and AK-74s can be changed to have only 5 shots with a welded on magazine that one must feed bullets in to like one does an old Winchester or Marlin from the side. Even if someone jimmied up the semi-auto function to full auto they would only get five shots. Of course criminals or revolutionaries could alter that with more work-yet as I pointed out it isn't very difficult to make a one time shotgun or a grease gun from plumbing supplies or whatever. The I.E.D. people go for bigger weapons. It is as if the President believes Americans are stupid.
Possibly there are more Ak-47s in the world than any other weapon and they are very fine weapons. They are the cheap Mauser of our era. For hunting dear or bear with the 7.62 round they are good field weapons that function well when dirty, muddy or wet. They are also cheaper than the weapons the rich and middle class can afford. If one is hunting a 300 pound feral Russian bore in the hilly brush beyond Laredo one wants a kill on first shot I would think.
In Alaska long ago at a drill I climbed over a ten-foot cyclone fence with an M-60 machine gun to flank at practice killing the NCO instructors. I actually got behind them and stood there a second before pulling the trigger. When I did I got one shot and the machine gun jammed because I had got dust in the barrel. In the real world I would have been standing there without hope of evading the retaliation from the survivor. Yet if I were firing real bullets instead of dummy bullets maybe the recoil would have been enough to let the weapon recycle automatically. I never went to a war and never found out.
Later the instructors ambushed us all and unloaded full magazines from M-16s upon us in a little valley below. That was how it was supposed to work.
Securing the nation's borders and modifying good jobs for American citizens would be a far better political course to take than to continue a psychological program of disarming the citizens and regarding them as pig meat with minds that don't matter and are subject to infinite programming because there isn't an objective reality.
