Permission to Rant

"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." George Orwell

"The tragic death of a six-year-old in the Colorado cinema massacre not only highlights the madness of lax US gun laws, but the attitude of a society that appears all too ready to anaesthetise its young to the consequences of gun violence. A mother's choice to take a six-year-old to a midnight showing of a violent and confronting film is in itself a shocking reminder many parents, even in this country, seem to forget that the young are often unable to differentiate between fantasy and reality. Reports seem to indicate that this confusion could characterise the mindset of the young mass killer." Richard McCarthy Verrierdale (Qld)

That's about as good as it got in today's cluster of letters on the cinema massacre in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Never quite happy when the penny goes just so far but no further, I thought I'd fill in some of Richard's gaps. Watch the spray:

It takes far more than Hollywood to anaesthetise young Americans to the consequences of gun violence. American gun violence knows no borders. It's imperial, global. It blew Iraq apart. And it's blowing apart Afghanistan and a host of other places around the planet as I type. The very president who makes a show of mourning with the victims of the massacre has a kill list and a proliferating arsenal of drones which rain death and destruction from the skies on men, women and children, mostly brown - and therefore, in the eyes of the president, his Ziocon cabal and their errand boys, guilty as hell.

And seriously, what's that about the inability of the young to differentiate between fantasy and reality? Only the young? If violence is as American as apple pie, fantasy is even more so. Forget the kid, forget the demented murderer, why is the mother, any mother, anyone, flocking to such garbage - at midnight or any other time? What sort of society gets off on batmen, supermen or spidermen for God's sake?