Equations, Again

12  people were killed in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater during the midnight screening of the new Batman movie. The number of wounded floats around 50; it depends on who you talk to, what you watch, and/or hear.

Most headlines and reports call the perpetrator of the shooting a shooter or a gunman. We call the news reporter a reporter, the golf player a golfer, the doctor a doctor, you get the point. Within days the tone of the situation will morph, detached from the initial shock, and our shooter will evolve into an insane murderer, a psychotic killer, or something of the sort.
What makes fastidious little heads such as mine ache is the media's and the public's refusal to call the "shooter" what he actually is: a terrorist. This shooting is, according to the very definition of the word, a terrorist attack. The type of act which plucks the lives of multiple people out from our physical realm is not schizophrenic. Let's call a spade a spade.  
The Columbine shooting, which the quick of wit have already associated to this most recent tragedy due to its geographic location, was terrorism. Two young, white, American men planned and carried out the killing of their peers with the cold and callous precision of your Al Qaeda enemy. Muslim extremists enter a battlefield hypnotized by a certain pseudo-religious ideology; the Columbine duo, drunk with envy, hatred, and influenced by (Marilyn Manson, the devil?).
Reactions to Columbine were the usual: the public and the media weighed in with their equations. The arithmetically inclined blamed violence in video games, violence in movies, violence on tv, entertainment in general, etc. "You reap what you sow" and such. Terrorists, the brown ones from the Middle East, do not get the blame unloaded onto the curb of the amoral hotel which is society. No, this Muslim brand of terrorist is blood thirsty yet sane, lucid, calculating, and all responsible for their actions, their sanity never comes into question. They are religiously and ethnically inclined to carry out horrific acts. You just need to look at Fox News' treatment of the Norwegian Christian extremist who went on a killing spree of his own. Fox never called the man a terrorist, they instead diagnosed him with insanity and pawned his acts off on the absence of a stable mind. This was the case even after the Norwegian terrorist admitted he had killed all those people in the name of Christianity. Strange indeed.
James Holmes, Aurora's terrorist, carried out an attack which at the moment seems very much like a scene conjured by the mind of Christopher Nolan himself. A gas canister was thrown and the shooting of patrons attempting to flee the theater began shortly thereafter. If you have followed thus far you can see an equation begin to unravel. Our beloved Batman and his nemeses seem to have influenced Mr. Holmes, Mr. Shooter, to carry out this horrendous act. Holmes gets neither the axe nor the tongue; he is insane, they'll say, he is not a terrorist. By false definition, he cannot be a terrorist. He does not fit the bill.
Now, let us do as we do and shake fruitless trees: let us pray for the victims and their families instead of finding a way to make guns harder to obtain.

-Alex