The cinema is an important part of my life. It’s a place I’ve gone when I’ve been happy, to celebrate, for birthdays, to catch up with friends. It has also been a place of retreat – somewhere to be solitary, but not alone. To distract me from situations, thoughts and decisions which otherwise swamp my mind.
There are not that many places we have like this as a society, where we can sit in a room full of strangers and all share the same experience – whether it is hating on terrible dialogue or being amazed at a new effect which within three months will become run of the mill.
So the thought that last night, in one city, this changed from a scene of anticipation to one of horror is almost impossible for me to comprehend.
It worries me how desensitised I’ve become to hearing of random shootings and death – it’s almost like it has become an expected occurrence now. I don’t know how wide the news of the shooting at the midnight screening of Batman in Denver has spread, but this one, at least to me, felt different. It shouldn’t. It’s worrying that it does. Any shooting is horrible. For this I guess it’s maybe because I can relate more. I go to the cinema almost once a week. I’ve worked in two cinemas, and it is horrible to think that this happened in a crowd no different from any of the others I watched excitedly line up to see the film last night.
I’ve never been to America. I don’t know much about the constitution. But I just don’t understand how the free availability of guns is still a thing. I have no doubt there are people capable of this kind of thing in every country – but the fact that it happens time and time again in the U.S.A. should surely speak louder than the words of men who lived hundreds of years ago, in an era when women didn’t have the vote, and where people still had slaves.
