And it should be. Frankly we have no knowledge of what his parents knew other than the apparent fact that his mother recognized that her son was the perpetrator when the news broke. That’s probably the most significant aspect of the entire thing.

He’s a Ph.D. student who has always been a stellar academic in all of his travels thusfar. He was accepted into that program with just an undergraduate degree – which meant he dove from the relatively shallow end of neuroscience into the deepest of the deep ends of the pool. Neuroscience undergraduate at UC-Riverside is one thing – it’s a hard course of study but it’s not insurmountable. The Ph.D. program he was in is a totally different story. He went from being one of the smartest people he knew to being one of the people who couldn’t swim, apparently. Already socially introverted, he withdrew even further.

For one reason or another, due to explanations we don’t have access to, over the course of that year it became clear he couldn’t hack it.

I read that the University was thinking of putting him on academic probation, which would have been reasonable but he wouldn’t accept it. Instead, he decided to withdraw from the program instead of allowing the University to help him stay in it.

If you snub a Ph.D. program like that in its attempts to help you avoid the road rash you’re going to get from falling off the bike, you can effectively say that your entire future career in that discipline has been foreclosed on. In other words, at the moment he made the decision to withdraw his academic life in the field he worked so hard to be a part of was effectively over. Nobody at this point understand why he decided not to take the helping hand. He walked away. It was approximately around that time he started amassing his arsenal and planning his Grand Finale.

Somewhere along the line in the past year or so, his outlook went from “best of the best” to “I’m taking myself out along with as many people as I can take with me.”

So far we’ve learned precious little about what his parents knew regarding his state of late-stage desparation. But we can reasonably speculate that they knew it was pretty bad. In fact they may have been subsidizing him. He was also collecting unemployment benefits on his way out the door, which apparently he used to buy everything he did under the radar.

By the way my estimate of all the materials and devices he used to commit all the crimes is under $7,000. People speculated at the high end of that spectrum, something like $20 grand, but it’s not so. He could have assembled the arsenal piecemeal over several months for not a lot more than 5 grand.

He also knew what he was doing. The insanity thing he’s playing right now belies the fact that everything was meticulously planned, including timing the music in his apartment. If someone had killed him at the theater, the first responders to his apartment would have probably blown themselves up. He was quite lucid in his planning and execution of events, and he did it with an IQ a couple of standard deviations above the mean.

He was about to get tossed out of the apartment he booby trapped. They’ve been awfully quiet and deliberately so. My sincere belief is that they’ve known for a while that their son was going off the rails. We’ll see.

In “…someone of his caliber…”

It’s a horrible story in every way imaginable and I’m not trying to joke about it.

And to indulge in that fascination slightly – and I mean ABSOLUTELY NO harm to the people in the theater – he chose the movie carefully. People who go to midnight screenings of Batman near opening night are pretty dedicated fans.

He deliberately chose that audience to massacre – it wasn’t an accident, either. He could have chosen other movies, other times, other places but it was the midnight screening of a Batman sequel on opening night where people who were pretty dedicated fans who would probably stay up all night long and go to a 24 hour diner and talk about the movie would be in the audience. He wanted to kill that audience, I think. And he knew that the people in that audience would be most susceptible to thinking his initial moves with the booms and the gas were a “theater effect” – perhaps even one they thought was “part of the show” and *wanted* to see.

So there is definitely an element of that in his crime. In my view it was an absolutely deliberate choice he made. He wasn’t looking to kill the people who sauntered up disinterestedly to the theater three weeks later chose to go to Batman after considering 4 or 5 other movies, out of boredom and ennui. He timed the whole thing to coincide with the **real fans**, the people who had really wanted to go, in that particular location. The comic book fans, the real movie aficianados, the late-night denizens, the movie geeks, basically. He chose the timing in part because he wanted to kill the audience he intended to kill.

It was a very elaborately and meticulously planned atrocity, as far as I can see. It’s one of the most horrific things I’ve ever witnessed either real or imaginary, on every level it’s horrific.

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Which is very rare, there are a lot of credit card transactions that trace back to somewhere. And those people would have gotten the bill. And my pure speculation is that it’s his parents.

Well, unless they have records of the timing, who are you to believe?

If ABC News mis-reported what she said, though, let’s all get together and ask that they just all resign. Because if they misreported that, too, they all should. We could use one less alphabet network.

The gear he was wearing would have withstood almost every handgun round that hit it, except for certain types of high-velocity penetrating rounds. He chose a dark theater and also tossed smoke canisters around to further obscure the view of anyone who might have shot back at him.

Even if several people in the theater had been armed it’s very hard to see how they could have been effective unless they moved quickly on him and managed to charge him and shoot him at point blank range, or got off an *extremely* good shot.

Not saying I wouldn’t have wanted to try. If I had been there, I would have, but it would have been a tough, tough shot against a guy with a shotgun, a handgun, an AR-15 and dressed in full body armor, in the dark, in the smoke and confusion.

Charging the shooter was the only real way to stop the violence and charging the shooter was a death sentence to at least some of the people who might have tried, which is why nobody did.

Many people who have never fired a handgun don’t realize that they’re hard enough to shoot accurately under good conditions. Maintaining your skill at shot placement takes practice, and that’s when you’re not on a “two way firing range” that is shooting back at you with shotguns and suchlike.

Under pressure, with your heart pounding 180 bpm in a dark theater against an assailant armed and armored like this guy was, you’d better believe those shots are going to be a challenge.

Also, he apparently dosed himself with Vicodin before the rampage, to further deaden his perception of pain. That means it would have been even more difficult to disable him with merely an injuring shot, instead of one to a vital organ or the central nervous system. And let’s not forget, on a head shot you’d be shooting through the helmet he was wearing or the gas mask he had on, if you engaged him face to face, exposing yourself to his weapons.

I’m not saying someone who was carrying and who was very brave couldn’t have made a difference. I’m saying it’s not a pleasant scenario for even an experienced concealed carry person to consider.

It’s very hard for me to judge what would have deterred him aside from the assurance of meeting truly overwhelming force. He obviously wasn’t deterred by the thought of encountering some resistance because that’s why he armored up and took the Vicodin and did it all anyway.

He was going in with the expectation someone might have shot back at him. He booby trapped his apartment so that if he got killed in the theater, he’d have the “last laugh” when the first responders busted down his door. He was prepared, mentally and in terms of his equipment and the drug he took, for someone in that theater to be armed.

I’m not saying nobody should have been. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have tried to resist him if I had been there and been armed. I’m saying it wouldn’t have been easy. One guy/gal with a .380 pocket pistol from 20 feet away would have needed a miracle. Even someone with a full-sized duty pistol in 9mm or .40 or .45ACP would have been at an enormous disadvantage.

I read the music was on a timer. It’s probable that he had several alternative uses in mind for the apartment. Luckily as far as the apartment is concerned none of it came to pass – in part because at the end he wound up telling the police himself that it was booby trapped. The downstairs neighbor, female medical student had the sense not to barge through the door even though it was unlocked and she was angry the loud music was keeping her awake. It’s not hard to imagine him thinking:

“If someone opens the door and sets the apartment off, the police will go there first. Then I’ll have the theater to myself.

If nobody opens the door and the police come to the theater first, and kill me, I’ll have the last laugh when they open the door.”

We don’t know exactly what he was thinking but no matter how you slice it, it’s pretty perverse.

Also, I’d like to say something else: Just because I’m telling people it wouldn’t have been easy to stop this guy doesn’t mean I’m anti-CCW in any way. I have a license to carry concealed and I use it – but I’m also aware of the difficulties involved with it. Once you get one and you start carrying, and really think about what you’re doing, it becomes a lot clearer. It is in no way as simple as thinking: “Now I’ve got a gun, I’m ready for anything.” In fact the more you educate yourself about it, the more of a weighty responsibility it is. That’s what I’m trying to get across here.

I recommend people read Massad Ayoob’s “In The Gravest Extreme.” And if they’re really going to carry a gun and not just have the license and own the gun, they should seriously consider additional training on top of what they needed to get the gun and the license in the first place.

Remember that even in a self-defense situation the instant you draw that weapon, you are now under the spotlight of the criminal statutes where you live just as assuredly as if you were a criminal. You’d better not be guilty.

That’s why I have my license and my guns, but nobody should take it easy. It’s a serious responsibility and there’s a lot more to it than just being able to fire a gun.