Incendiary Image of the Day: The Trace Waves the Bloody Shirt Over Aurora Mass Shooting

I’ve got no problem showing the results of firearms-related violence up close and personal. TTAG has and will continue to post videos of defensive gun uses, suspicious police shootings and negligent discharges, for example. But context matters. Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun agitprop propagators at thetrace.com posted the above image above their story The Impossible Grief of Children Who Lose a Parent in a Mass Shooting. Surprisingly . . .

Trace scribe Elizabeth Van Brocklin’s article doesn’t call for increased gun control. I reckon that’s because Bloomberg’s anti-ballistic propagandist figured that waving the bloody shirt over the Aurora mass shooting was enough to get the gun control point across. What’s missing: the Aurora police’s and University of Colorado’s abject failure to prevent the slaughter. wikipedia.org:

On January 14, 2013, Chantel Blunk, widow of victim Jonathan Blunk, filed a lawsuit against the University of Colorado in federal court. She alleged that a school psychiatrist could have prevented the slaughter by having Holmes detained after he admitted he “fantasized about killing a lot of people.”

Not to mention the fact that Holmes sent his school psychiatrist – a woman who’d set up a task force to identify potential spree killers – a notebook detailing his plans (the school claims the book was lost/delayed in the University mailroom). As cnn.com reported during Holmes’ murder trial, Dr. Fenton testified that…

Holmes told her in March 2012 that he had “homicidal thoughts” — as often as three or four times a day. As his treatment progressed, he told her his obsession with killing was only getting worse.

And yet, Fenton told a jury there was little she could do because Holmes never talked about specifics. She couldn’t place him under a psychiatric hold because he never disclosed his intention to kill . . .

At their first meeting, Holmes expressed “thoughts about killing people,” but Fenton said she didn’t think he was dangerous. She believed his preoccupation with killing others was a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder . . .

After their fourth session on April 17, she noted that he made several odd statements she didn’t understand and wrote in her notes, “psychotic level thinking?” He said his homicidal obsession was “getting worse.”

huffingtonpost.com revealed the campus police’s failings . . .

More than a month before James Holmes’ rampage on a Colorado movie theater, the head of his neuroscience graduate program called a campus police officer with alarming information: Holmes had told his psychiatrist that he wanted to kill people to make up for his failure in science.

The call, never previously disclosed, came just after the psychiatrist expressed similar concerns to the same University of Colorado campus police officer. But newly released documents show the officer did little other than check to see whether Holmes had a criminal record and deactivate his campus access cards. And his psychiatrist declined to detain Holmes, who had revealed no specific targets or threats, because she thought it would only “inflame him.”

I bring all this up – again – because The Trace article is completely devoid of context. By its inclusion on their site – with the incendiary image above – it silently argues for gun control, which didn’t and couldn’t have done anything to stop Holmes’ rampage.

Truth be told, Holmes had signaled his murderous intentions clearly to people who could have done something about it. But chose not to. That’s the lesson here. Meanwhile, our sympathies to the friends, families and colleague of those murdered in Aurora.