Colorado shooting: a day of prayerful memorials and a presidential visit (+video)

"People see cases like this and say 'it's really terrible but let's not change our gun laws,' " he said. “I think Americans have simply come to learn to accept this level of violence, and many don’t realize that most other developed nations don’t have this kind of problem. It's easy to say this is the price you pay for our freedoms when it's not your child or your neighbor or your friend."

Based on the years he spent studying the mass shooting in Littleton, Colo., 13 years ago, Dave Cullen – author of the book “Columbine” – cautions the public, the media, and even those considered experts not to rush to conclusions about Holmes’s character, personality, and motivation.

To his regret, he joined others in doing just that with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the students at Columbine High School who killed 12 classmates and a teacher, wounding 26 others before killing themselves. What he found was a far more complicated and in some ways surprising story than had been portrayed about the killers.

“Over the next several days, you will be hit with all sorts of evidence fragments suggesting one motive or another. Don’t believe any one detail,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed column Sunday. “Resist the temptation to extrapolate details prematurely into a whole…. The killer is rarely who he seems.”

As has been the case with other mass shootings (Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Tucson, Ariz., where Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was severely wounded), there’s a fear that too much media attention and speculation – poring over details without adding much understanding – could trigger copycat attacks.

"The media has a real dilemma that I don't know the answer to," Kenneth Lanning, a former FBI behavioral scientist, told ABC News. "I'm not going to suggest they don't cover it, but this will be all over the place, and that fuels the problem of this happening again. It guarantees that one guy with problems will say that's what I want."

A prayer vigil is to be held in Aurora Sunday evening, and Obama was scheduled to spend several hours there late Sunday afternoon.

"These families need that kind of contact by our elected leader," Aurora police chief Dan Oates said on "Face the Nation." "It will be very powerful and it will help them. As awful as what they've been through and what they're going through has been, having the president here is very, very powerful, it means a great deal to them and all of Aurora.”

The Associated Press reports the following:

Aurora shooting suspect James Holmes applied to join a Colorado gun range but never became a member after the owner became concerned over his "bizarre" message and behavior.

Owner Glenn Rotkovich says Mr. Holmes e-mailed an application to join the Lead Valley Range in Byers on June 25 and there were no overt warning signs in that form.

Holmes said he was not a user of illegal drugs or a convicted felon, so Mr. Rotkovich followed up by calling Holmes's apartment to invite him to a mandatory orientation the following week. Rotkovich got Holmes's answering machine and says "it was bizarre – guttural, freakish at best."

Rotkovich left two other messages but eventually told his staff to watch for Holmes at the July 1 orientation and not to accept him into the club.

Previous

1 | 2