I did some reading about the psychology of those who go on shooting rampages, the quiet guy who suddenly appears with a machine gun or hunting rifle and begins picking off total strangers without warning. Reading this stuff, the Aurora, Colorado The Dark Knight Rises shooter is easy to understand. Like most of these cases, he was a guy who was previously thought to have tremendous prospects, so depressed with what his life had become that he decided he was going to go out in a "blaze of glory." His choice of the Batman movie was not casual. Reports said he told police he was "The Joker." Frustrated and helpless in reality, he spaced out into a comic book/movie fantasy land, and since he had failed to be the hero, he chose to be the villain. Or maybe he felt his Joker role had been chosen for him.

But I don't think he's the only one stuck in fantasy thinking. How about the people who say even more guns on the street could have solved this?

It doesn't take a lot of Internet surfing to find some right-wingers saying allowing concealed carry in the theater could have solved this, more gun ownership would have stopped this, etc. The posters talk about, "I have a right to protect my person," "I'm ensuring the security of my family," up to and including, "The forefathers wanted an armed citizenry who could take down tyrants," "They'll be going neighborhood by neighborhood collecting guns any day," etc. (Read this page for loads of the latter nutso talk.)

Maybe the movies are to blame. While the Aurora shooter was in a Dark Knight fantasy land, these guys are constantly preparing for the day they'll be Charles Bronson or Dirty Harry. The predators are everywhere, the threats come from every direction, but they take warm comfort in the mental image of how cooly they'll one day pull their sidearm from its holster and save the day, probably getting off a witty, memorable line before they pull the trigger. They'll have to work hard to be humble when the TV crews ask them how they so expertly saved the day, maybe working in a quote about the founding fathers and how great America is (that's the part of the speech they still work on while they sit stuck in traffic in the mornings). Yeah, that's going to be a glorious day.

Maybe if we all turned off the TV's and went out into public and shook hands and looked everyone in the eye, stopped living in some sound stage-created neverland of movies and TV, we'd be better off and Aurora, Colorado scenes wouldn't happen.

Or maybe I'm in fantasy land.