“What holds true then remains the case today: no film makes you kill. Having a mind to kill, at least in any systematic fashion, means that your mind is ready-warped; that the warping may well have started long before, perhaps in childhood; and that you may perhaps seek out, or be drawn to, areas of sensation—notably those entailing sex or violence—which can encourage, inflame, or accelerate the warping. Whatever we learn of the Aurora murderer, whatever he may profess, and whatever the weaponry, body armor, and headgear that he may have sported, and however it seems like a creepy match for what is worn, by heroes and villains alike, in the Batman movies—despite all that, he was not driven by those movies to slaughter.” - Anthony Lane (The New Yorker)

There will be discussion in the coming weeks about what caused this, with movies as the likely front-runner, and there is an automatic jump to this because people want something tangible to blame- books, movies, video games, guns, TV, music, the internet- because those are tangible things they feel they could have control over, as opposed to how it unfortunately actually is, that the type of person who has decided to murder a roomful of strangers did so because of something very wrong inside them already, something you can't see, legislate, control, or often even notice until it's too late.