I was saddened to hear today about the passing of left-wing journalist/provocateur Alexander Cockburn, who died of cancer at the age of 71. Cockburn was a difficult, frequently exasperating figure. First, some of the awful things: as this right-wing website gleefully notes, the man ended his days as a climate change denialist. Throughout his career, he took great delight in viciously attacking Democratic politicians, which is something that I’m not against in principle, but it never made any kind of sense to me that the very people he went after most ferociously were often stalwarts of the most leftward precincts of the Democratic party, such as his perennial punching bag, Bernie Sanders, who is after all probably the closest thing we have to a genuine fire-breathing social democrat in the U.S. Congress.

And then there were the any number of endless notorious pronouncements he made over the years, often concerning Israel or the USSR. Such as his unforgivable remarks about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: “[I]f ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains filled with barbarous ethnics with views as medieval as their muskets, and unspeakably cruel too …”

And yeah, as you may have guessed from that last quote, when it came to gender issues, he totally sucked.

And yet, and yet … there are also important things about Cockburn’s life and work that are worthy of admiration. His writing had wit, style, and exuberance, and so, apparently, did the man. He makes a memorable appearance in James Wolcott’s extremely enjoyable memoir about 1970s New York, Lucking Out, where he is described as “the Voice’s brightest journalistic star … along with his stylistic brilliance he was English and sexy, whooshing in and out of the building on a jet stream of daredevilish charisma.”

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File this one in the “it’s about bloody time” department: the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Obama administration, in the form of a report issued by the Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is recommending that “Congress to make it easier for people to discharge a portion of certain student debt by filing for bankruptcy protection.”

So far, what’s being recommended is very limited. It would apply only to private loans issued by lenders like Sallie Mae, not to loans backed by the federal government. Private loans comprise only about 15% of total outstanding student debt.

Moreover, it’s not like the Obama administration is expending significant political capital on this proposal, at least not yet. All they are doing is “urging” Congress to consider it. It remains to be seen how hard they push for this thing, let alone whether they can get it through Congress. Still, even Sallie Mae supports a version the proposal; they agree that student loans should be be dischargeable for those people “who have made a good-faith effort to repay their student loans over a five- to seven-year period and still experience financial difficulty.”

Much, much more needs to be done to contain, let alone reverse, the burgeoning student loan crisis. Federal student loans should also be dischargeable in bankruptcy, of course, and that’s just for starters (though admittedly it would be much more difficult sell, politically). A far greater proportion of state and federal student aid needs to come in the form of grants rather than loans — as it once did. Loan forgiveness programs, perhaps in exchange for working a couple of years in public service jobs, should be far more widespread. Colleges also need to reduce skyrocketing tuition costs; among the ways they could do so would be to trim their administration-heavy payrolls and cut the exorbitant salaries of college presidents and other top administrators.

Finally, we really need to inject the notion of tuition-free public college into the public conversation. A college education at a public institution should be free of charge to anyone who is academically capable of doing college-level work, in exactly the same way that grades K through 12 are free. It wasn’t so long ago that, for example, that many large public university systems, like the University of California system and CUNY in New York, did not charge tuition at all. In today’s economy, a college degree is as vital to economic security as high school diplomas were in the twentieth century. It’s high time we as a society accept this fact, and the 1 percenters start giving back to the country that has given them so much, by paying taxes at a level that would support vital institutions like public universities. I would not expect them to do this out of the kindness of their hearts, but if they care about building a thriving economy and a workforce that will be able to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex and competitive world, it’s something that must be done.

Here we are, a day after the horrifying events that took place in Aurora, Colorado, and the thing that chills me to the bone is how ordinary it has come to seem. A deranged gunman coolly and methodically shoots up a college campus, a high school, a military base, a museum, a supermarket at a meet-and-greet with a local Congresswoman. Anywhere from one to several dozen people die, and many more than that are seriously injured. These outbursts of lethal violence occurring at such familiar American institutions and shattering the peaceful, quotidian activities of everyday life that were taking place there once seemed shocking. Now they seem almost banal — oh god, one of these nuts again? How many were killed this time? And does anyone have a clue why?

So the fact that yet another place we once thought was safe — a movie theater — has been shown to be anything but, is unsettling, but not, anymore, unimaginable. And so we go through the usual rituals. Liberals point to the need for stricter gun control laws, but sadly, that seems to be all but a lost cause. If the Columbine massacre, which seemed unimaginably shocking at the time, didn’t spur big changes in Colorado’s gun laws, it’s hard to see how any other event could. And certainly neither of the two major party candidates for president have breathed a word about how this tragedy illustrates the need for gun control.

Another familiar ritual: we read profiles of the killer, and look for clues — were the signs of trouble always there? Could he have been stopped? What’s especially scary about the case of James Holmes, the Aurora gunman, is that there do not appear to have been any signs that things were clearly out of whack. According to various media reports, Holmes had had no run-ins with the law other than a speeding ticket, and though he was in the process of dropping out of his Ph.D. program, it was for academic reasons, not because of mental health issues or behavioral problems. He came from an apparently stable, middle-class family, and is described by those who knew him as studious, smart, and even (I shudder to use the word here) “kind.” Acquaintances say he was quiet and slightly awkward socially, and he had some nerdy hobbies like online role-playing games. But nothing remotely suggests that he would even contemplate, let alone commit, such a monstrous act.

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I’m about talked out today. But here are a few final items:

* At Ten Miles Square, Harold Pollack suggests that this time we don’t put a mass murderer’s face on magazine covers or publish any ravings he happens to emit.

* Also at Ten Miles Square, Ezra Klein ruefully outlines the kind of constructive conservative candidate Mitt Romney might have been—but refused to be, and probably couldn’t be in today’s GOP.

* At Salon, Paul Campos—a Coloradan—hopes that the Aurora nightmare will help remind us that 15,000 Americans are murdered every year.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer runs through the debate over what to do with Joe Paterno’s statue at Penn State.

* At The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky meditates on wealth, success, failure and envy in the context of the documentary, The Queen of Versailles.

And in non-political news:

* Boutique apologizes for “Kim K-inspired Aurora Dress” tweet.

That’s it for today. Kathleen Geier, who has a lot of fans here, will be back as Weekend Blogger tomorrow.

I’ll end the day’s blogging much as I started it: for the victims in Aurora, their families and friends, and our ever-stricken human race: the “Agnus Dei” from Mozart’s Requiem.

Selah.

“The danger of any ordinance restricting commerce is that it will wind up protecting incumbent interests at the expense of new entrants into the market,” notes journalist Blake Fleetwood in “DIY B&B;,” his contribution to the July/August issue of the Washington Monthly. And that’s exactly what’s been happening to the rapidly growing and recession-driven home-grown B&B; industry as municipal governments around the country pursue a regulatory crackdown that seems designed not to ensure safety and honesty—or even revenue—but simply to protect traditional hospitality interests.

In New York, Fleetwood reports, a unemployed homeowner named Jonathan Hogan found himself confronted by police officers and city officials for the sin of renting out spare rooms over the internet:

For more than a year now, New York City has been enforcing a new state law that makes it illegal for homeowners like Hogan to rent out their house or apartment for less than a month. All across the city, police raids have shut down hundreds of similar informal bed-and-breakfast establishments, with nearly 1,900 different violations issued in under twelve months. Often, the fees associated with the citations stretch into tens of thousands of dollars. Hogan was threatened with a $25,000 fine—all for marketing the empty rooms in his house.

The backstory is that a combination of hotels, hotel unions, and tenant activists (who feared landlords would dump tenants from rent-controlled apartments to begin supplying vacation rentals) lobbied for and secured a new state law in 2010 making rentals for under a month in New York residential buildings illegal. Another tourist-rich city, New Orleans, has begun enforcing a similar ordinance, and several Florida municipalities have moved in the same direction. While some regulation (and taxation) of a previously obscure but now booming internet-based B&B; industry seems reasonable, the over-reaction in New York and elsewhere threatens the ability of entirely legitimate enterprises that often makes use of the only asset struggling homeowners possess.

But it’s in New York, notes Fleetwood, that a workable compromise may emerge:

In a rare instance of an industry asking for more regulation and taxes, a group representing New York’s besieged short-term rental owners is backing a proposed state law that would similarly define, regulate, certify, and tax legitimate vacation rental apartments. In return for legitimacy and freedom from harassment and fines, the group, the Short Term Rental and Hospitality Association (STRAHA), says its members would gladly pay the same occupancy tax that regular hotels pay.

One can only hope—for homeowners and travelers alike—this kind of arrangement can be worked out in New York before the backlash against home-grown B&Bs; really spreads.

There’s been a lot of fine analysis of the arguments of Republican governors about the “unaffordability” of the Medicaid expansion, and I’ve added my two cents by pointing out that some of these same governors hate the Medicaid program as it exists today.

But at The Nation Richard Kim has done something even more interesting: taken a close look at some of the unusually regressive tax policies in the states with “rejectionist” governors, and the impact it would have on their supposedly stretched-to-the-breaking-point budgets if they’d get rid of them.

Here’s a sample:

South Carolina’s Nikki Haley wrote in an op-ed that the “price tag to South Carolina tax payers” would be “an extra $1.1 to $2.3 billion” over the next six years. In fact, the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid Expansion and the Uninsured calculated that South Carolina would have to kick in between $470 million and $615 million, depending on how many people chose to enroll. Again, in the first six years of the expansion, the federal government would pay for more than 95 percent of the total costs, between $11.4 and $12.7 billion depending on the participation rate.

South Carolina is also one of eight states that offers a substantial capital gains tax break, a policy that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthiest 20 percent. Since 1991, the state has allowed residents to deduct 44 percent of their long-term capital gains income from their taxes. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, in 2010, this tax break cost South Carolina about $115 million in revenue. If they were to raise only that amount annually during the first six years of the expansion by getting rid of the capital gains tax break, they’d raise $690 million—which would more than pay for the Medicaid expansion.

Let’s take a look at another regressive state tax policy. In Iowa, Republican governor Terry Branstad has claimed that the Medicaid expansion is “unaffordable, unsustainable.” But Iowa is one of three states that allow taxpayers to deduct 100 percent of their federal income tax payments from their state taxes. As the ITEP points out in its report, this unusual tax break undermines the progressivity of federal tax policy and overwhelmingly benefits the top 20 percent, who enjoy between 76 and 83 percent of the cuts. In 2011, Iowa lost about $642 million in potential revenue to this tax break—that’s almost 25 percent of its total tax revenue! Governor Branstad himself made out quite well under this tax break. In 2011, he paid just $52 in state income taxes because he was able to deduct his 2010 federal taxes from his 2011 state income tax bill.

What would expanding Medicaid to insure 115,000 residents cost Iowa between 2014 and 2019? Just $147 million. If folks like Governor Branstad paid their fair share of state income taxes, Iowa would raise almost $3.9 billion in those years. Or in other words, it could pay for the expansion more than twenty-six times over.

In Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal has said the state can’t “afford another entitlement program.” But his state also allows residents to deduct 100 percent of their federal income tax payments from their state taxes. If it didn’t, it would raise $642 million a year—or $3.9 billion over six years. By getting rid of this tax break for the rich, Louisiana could newly insure 366,000 people by 2019, at a cost of just $337 million to the state, more than eleven times over.

Kim has similar data for Texas, Florida and Mississippi, other states whose governors say they just can’t afford the Medicaid expansion but certainly can afford tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens.

More broadly, Kim helps us remember that government budgets aren’t just numbers on a chart, and don’t come down from on high: they represent conscious decisions reflecting a community’s priorities. Churchgoers are all familiar with that biblical line (Luke 12:34) so always deployed in annual stewardship drives: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” These governors aren’t victims of hard times or impossible choices: they choose to value regressive tax policies more than providing health insurance for their neediest citizens. In the case of the Medicaid expansion, it’s an especially egregious choice. So you can see where their hearts are.

Weird, sad day. And to think, last week was Friday 13th. Anyway, here’s some more news bites:

* Death toll in Aurora now 13, with several other victims still in ICU.

* Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta discusses depressingly familiar rollout of mass shooting news.

* Dave Weigel throws cold water on Goehmert theory that someone with concealed-carry weapon could have stopped shootings.

* After blasting ABC for dumb linkage of Aurora shooter to Tea Party, Breitbart “reports” he was a registered Democrat, then has to retract “story.”

* At New Yorker, Adam Gopnik argues Adam Smith would have entirely agreed with Obama on public role in entrepreneurship.

And in non-political, non-mass-shooting news:

* Team USA dominates host Brits in Olympics roundball tuneup.

Back in a bit.

Just an idle question I’m curious about: does the rush to bury Barack Obama via vast attention to his alleged disrespect for business owners create a danger that Republicans will accidentally produce some blowback among the non-college educated white voters that are essential to the GOP coalition?

Sure, there are a goodly number of small business owners without college degrees, and yes, it’s possible the endless hammering of Obama for what James Taranto calls his “ressentiment” (using the Nietzschean term that tells us a lot more about Taranto than about Obama) could cut into the incumbent’s popularity with upscale voters. But there remain quite a few actual blue-collar workers who are unhappy with the economy and/or sympathetic to GOP cultural positions, but who are not exactly inclined to look at employers as a class and weep bitter tears of sympathy for the pain they feel when the president suggests they didn’t earn every penny from their own hard work.

In a recent and fascinating analysis of the “white working class” over at The Democratic Strategist which tries to get beyond the usual stereotypes, Andrew Levison talks a lot about the existence of a small but critical group he calls “working class moderates” who are open to Republican arguments, particularly on cultural themes, but don’t much like or trust big business. These are precisely the kind of voters the GOP needs, but aren’t going to attract if they come across as the party of John Galt, demanding not only lower taxes and less regulation, but unconditional respect. American white working-class voters may not be the Horny-Handed Sons of Toil of ancient lefty myth, but they’re also not fond of singing hymns of praise to The Man. Conservatives are in danger of forgetting that in their rush to make out Obama as the eternal enemy of the almighty Job Creators.

Amidst the chortling of conservatives that the president had blown the election by offending the sensibilities of “successful people,” Nate Cohn of TNR had this fascinating snippet of data yesterday:

[H]igh income voters might be less conservative on economic questions than self-interest suggests. Take today’s Quinnipiac poll of Virginia. It was a bad poll for Obama, but the President still earned 44 percent among those making more than $100,000 a year, down just slightly from 46 percent four years ago. But as strong as the President might appear among affluent voters, he’s less popular than his own proposal to raise taxes on precisely those voters. According to the same poll, 62 percent of voters making between $100-250,000/year support Obama’s tax plan and so do 48 percent of voters making more than $250,000/year. In 2008, Obama only received 47 percent of Virginia voters making more than $200,000/year.

Maybe a lot of better-off voters remember they did pretty well when the tax rates being proposed by Obama were in effect. Maybe they’re concerned about issues other than their own bottom line. And hell, maybe their definition of patriotism involves “giving something back” for the blessings they have derived from being American, as Obama suggested they should do in the allegedly offensive quote. But whatever it is, for all the caricatures of the president as some sort of Leveller who hates success, the successful like his Levelling tax proposal even more than they like Obama himself.

So stupid reactions to the Aurora shootings were by no means limited to ABC News. Gaze in awe at this commentary from U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, as reported by HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery:

During a radio interview on The Heritage Foundation’s “Istook Live!” show, Gohmert was asked why he believes such senseless acts of violence take place. Gohmert responded by talking about the weakening of Christian values in the country.

“You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of a derelict takes place,” Gohmert said.

“Some of us happen to believe that when our founders talked about guarding our virtue and freedom, that that was important,” he said. “Whether it’s John Adams saying our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people … Ben Franklin, only a virtuous people are capable of freedom, as nations become corrupt and vicious they have more need of masters. We have been at war with the very pillars, the very foundation of this country.”

Ernest Istook, the host of the show and a former Oklahoma congressman, jumped in to clarify that nobody knows the motivation of the alleged Aurora gunman. Gohmert said that may be true, but suggested the shootings were still “a terrorist act” that could have been avoided if the country placed a higher value on God.

“People say … where was God in all of this?” Gohmert said. “We’ve threatened high school graduation participations, if they use God’s name, they’re going to be jailed … I mean that kind of stuff. Where was God? What have we done with God? We don’t want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present.”

Gohmert also said the tragedy could have been lessened if someone else in the movie theater had been carrying a gun and took down the lone shooter.

Unlike Louie Gohmert, I’m a Christian who doesn’t think God is deeply invested in my political agenda, or kills people to teach my political opponents a lesson. I am tempted to petition the Almighty to smite this blasphemer with the gift of just a tiny bit of humility. And I hope some of the people who elected him to Congress—and his colleagues—feel just a tiny bit of shame.

I’m not hip enough to know (or remember) exactly when social media became so ubiquitous that they served as the primary vehicles for how many people receive, process and react to breaking news, but via Mike Walker, it seems some people are dealing with the Aurora shootings by tracking down people on Facebook with the same name as the alleged killer and shrieking at them:

As the search continues to grab the first picture of James Holmes - the suspect who opened fire at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater killing 12 people and wounding at least 38 others - many on social media networks, particularly Facebook, are abusing users with the same name.

The abuse has gotten so bad that it prompted a Facebook user with the name James Holmes to send a message declaring that he is not the suspected shooter:

“Dearest random Facebook people who keep confusing me for a mass murderer and still send me Facebook requests:

“I appreciate the fact that you are trying to become better-informed about the occurrences in Aurora last night, but you have been mislead, in that I am not the man who did it….

“James Holmes happens to be a pretty common name, surprisingly, so try not to jump the gun.”

Regards, A different guy named James Holmes

Amazing what people will do.

UPDATE:

And sure enough, along these same lines, an ABC reporter suggested the killer was a member of a Colorado Tea Party group because somebody named “Jim Holmes” from Aurora had posted a comment on the group’s website. Now the wingnutosphere is aflame with suggestions that “liberal media” are blaming the tragedy on the Tea Folk. Turns out it was a different “Jim Holmes,” of course, and ABC has retracted the report.

I appreciate that reporters like to break news, but this is just stupid, and BTW, my conservative friends, “liberals” did not buy the report at all, so just chill about it.

Reading a lot of conservative posts last night and this morning (unfortunately, just part of the gig here), I was mystified at the conviction of so many people that the mangled clips of the president’s “you didn’t build that” quote from Roanoke provided a gigantic, “aha” moment in the campaign that would drive Obama from the White House like a whipped Kenyan dog. The money quote that most of them are tossing around comes from the deep thinker Pat Sajak:

It’s as if President Obama climbed into a tank, put on his helmet, talked about how his foray into Cambodia was seared in his memory, looked at his watch, misspelled “potato” and pardoned Richard Nixon all in the same day.

Really? I mean, even if you buy the twisted, mendacious version of the Obama quote that the Romney campaign is retailing, are Americans really so protective of the tender sensibilities of business owners that they are shocked anyone would suggest that each and every one of them built their businesses strictly on their own? (Aside from from roads and bridges and inheritances, how’s about employees as a significant factor in business success?).

But then Dave Weigel explained it to me:

Call it a magic word gaffe—a statement that reveals not what a politician believes, but what you already feared, in your bone marrow, that a politician believes. Democrats still can’t understand why Obama’s speech is supposed to offend anyone. Republicans know that he’s a closet socialist, and that this sentiment only comes out when his energy is flagging….

A normal gaffe is usually discovered by the “mainstream” press, or by a rival campaign, in real time. Think about the Obama campaign hounding John McCain on his “the fundamentals of the economy are sound” as Lehman collapsed. Think about “the private sector is doing fine” becoming proof, for Romney, that Obama saw no problems in the private sector. The magic word gaffe takes more digging, because the media that mostly covers campaigns aren’t primed to hear what partisans hear.

Barack Obama’s presidency has been full of these moments. If you watched Glenn Beck during his Fox News years, you got endless exposure (more than 100 episodes of it, according to Lexis-Nexis) to an Oct. 30, 2008 quote from an Obama rally in Columbia, Mo. “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” said the candidate.

Bingo. The “magic word gaffe” is sort of the inverse of the “dog whistle” whereby pols use banal language that has a special meaning to ideologues (“constitutional conservative” being one notable example; “respect for life” being another). For our right-wing brothers and sisters, progressive (itself a magic word—maybe even a secret handshake—connoting Marxist convictions) discourse is full of these signifiers. “Equality.” “Fairness.” “Giving something back.” “Shared sacrifice.” Constant vigilance for these magic words is how conservatives have convinced themselves that the blandly pragmatic center-left politician Barack Obama pursuing leftover moderate Republican policies is a villain-figure straight out of Atlas Shrugged or (for the godly) Left Behind, hating success and righteousness.

The problem with this stuff, of course, is that the low-information swing voters who will decide the present election will require an awful lot of education to understand the magic word gaffes. They haven’t marinated their brains with Beckian revisionist history and don’t run around pasting “Breitbart Is Here!” posters on telephone poles. Many of them, in fact, probably don’t own businesses and don’t much think of their own bosses—much less the Mitt Romneys of the world—as heroic figures. So the nastiness aimed at Obama will inevitably get a lot coarser than what we hearing today. So what if a few facts get bent or invented along the way? America must be protected!

Anyone imagining that the shootings in Colorado last night will create some sort of groundswell of support for gun control (or even gun safety) legislation should read this post from WaPo’s Chris Cillizza:

In 1990, almost eight in ten Americans said that the “laws covering the sales of firearms” should be made “more strict” while just 10 percent said they should be made “less strict” or “kept as they are now”. By 2010, those numbers had drastically shifted with 54 percent preferring less strict or no change in guns laws and 44 percent believing gun laws should be made more strict.

Public opinion has also proven immune to past high profile tragedies involving guns. In 1999, when Gallup asked the question six times after the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, the number of those in favor of stricter laws ranged from 60 to 66 percent. The “less strict” number ranged from 5 to 9 percent and the “stay the same” number ranged from 25 to 31 percent.

The opinions were similar after the shootings at Virginia Tech in April 2007. By October of that year, 51 percent favored stricter gun laws, a 5 percent decline from a similar Gallup survey taken in the fall of 2006….

And, in the wake of the attempted assassination of [Gabrielle] Giffords, that pattern played out again — with little obvious change in how people view society’s relationship with guns.

We could debate for hours why this is the case—maybe it’s desensitization, maybe it’s a feeling of remoteness from the events, maybe people think wackos will get around gun laws anyway, or maybe people really are buying the gun lobby’s argument that more folks packing heat is their best protection against gun violence. But the evidence is pretty clear: last night’s events won’t change public opinion.

When I became a news-cycle-blogger, I didn’t think about the moments when some act of random violence would leave me wordless—or worse yet, feeling bad for saying anything at all about anything else. So I’ll just quote this reaction from Alyssa Rosenberg of Think Progress and let it go:

I woke up to the news this morning than 50 people had been shot by a young man at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Colorado, and at least twelve are dead.

Sean Collins is right that, to a certain extent, Batman is a fantasy about turning violence that is random, or in this case, unpredictable, into something that can be predicted and contained by the great efforts of a single man. Anthony Lane is correct that movies and murder have been linked before and will be linked again, though I think he is in more tenuous territory in discussing ugly threats against critics who did not like The Dark Knight Rises, which are themselves symbols of a brokenness I think fan culture has to deeply reckon with, and this act of violence. If you think The Dark Knight Rises is the greatest expression of cinema of all time, your next step is unlikely to be to kill people who, by their decision to show up for the first possible screening of the movie, give some semblance of agreeing with you.

Mostly what I feel is this: Midnight screenings are big, hyped, advertiser-driven events that have become a source of new information to feed the Hollywood data beast, but indicating how motivated audiences are to see a movie. But they’re also a product of genuine enthusiasm and an expression of collective joy. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy has meant a lot to an enormous number of filmgoers. And as someone who writes about movies, and who cares about the big, flawed thing we call fandom, I’m saddened by someone turning that shared enthusiasm into a weapon. And even if this tragedy hadn’t happened at the premiere of one of a dwindling number of genuinely mass cultural events, I hate the idea of using an audience’s suspension of disbelief, their openness to and absorption in the spectacle unfolding before them, as cover—the gunman reportedly started shooting during a sequence involving gunfire, meaning the audience was slower to react. We are vulnerable when we go to the movies, open to fear, and love, and disgust, and rapture, surrendering our brains and hearts to someone else’s vision of the world. We don’t expect to surrender our bodies, too.