(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) When unsuspecting cinegoers at the Century 16 theatre in Aurora, a suburb in Denver, Colorado, faced a masked gunman, they probably assumed it was part of the stuntmanship Hollywood is so famed for.
After all, it was the opening night of The Dark Knight Rises, the new Batman franchise. It soon turned out to be a horrific tragedy as the masked man opened fire and went on a mass shooting spree, killing 12 and injuring 50. Mass killings by Americans is not something new. There have been others, like the multiple shootings in Oakland five months ago, the Virginia Tech massacre that saw 32 killed and 21 injured and the Columbine massacre in 1999 in the suburban town of Littleton, Colorado, just 15 miles away from Aurora.
It was yet another dark night for Americans and what has now kicked in, predictably, is a frenzied global debate on the feasibility of the already controversial US Second Amendment that gives citizens of the world's biggest democracy the right to possess firearms - to protect themselves; a clause, that over the years, has proved to be entirely counter-intuitive, at times, with devastating consequences. Incidents of shoot-outs in a land sold as the one best equipped to realise Great Dreams have been commonplace. The powerful gun lobby runs America and all attempt to restrict sales has always been met with stiff opposition. The US has more gun-related deaths than any other industrialised nation and over 32,000 Americans die each year from gun related injuries.
What is a greater tragedy than the one unfolding in a little corner of the breathtakingly beautiful American state, is that the issue is snowballing into a political one, instead of just being treated respectfully as a heart-rending human one. With US elections round the corner, the blame games have begun in right earnest, and the spin doctors have swung into action.
Social media is full of criticism how the US, always intent on politicising matters - with typical American, and often unjustified twists - on the international stage, has not done enough to keep its own house in order. There are reports of a sense of disgruntlement prevailing, to alleviate which such misguided steps are being taken to trigger off a "class war". How do you even begin to associate taking the law into your own hands, trying to blink out a message, with this scale of mindless human carnage?
And you probably cannot blame the rest of the world to now say that Big Brother is better off watching over its own brood, and figuring out how its own brand of internal policies - political, economic, social - is affecting its collective, disturbed mindset.
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