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Massacre in Aurora: No way to understand what happened

Francisco Miraval

Last Friday, my editor called in the middle of the night and asked me to begin writing stories about the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, just a few miles from my home of almost two decades and at a place I know and visit with some frequency. I wrote the stories, took pictures, and interviewed people, but I still feel there is no way to understand what happened.

For example, I received a call from a radio station in Mendoza, Argentina. They wanted to know if the massacre was caused by poverty in Colorado, as if only poor people were violent. They also wanted to know if more gun control could have prevented the issue, as if there were less violence in countries with stricter gun control rules.

Then, I received a call from a radio station in Paris, France. In this case, they wanted to know in what ways the massacre affected the Hispanic community in Metro Denver area, as if Hispanics would only care about other Hispanics without caring about dead and wounded people of other ethnic groups.

I wrote ten stories, took hundreds of pictures, attended several press conferences, and interviewed dozens of people (including a mother who was inside Theater 9 and escaped unharmed with her two children), and I still do not know what happened.

Part of the problem is that there are many distorted versions of the story. For example, a national media services serving ethnic media published a story about Latinos “panicking” in Colorado after the shooting, something that never happened. And one person, and probably two, gave false information about victims of the massacre, perhaps even without any intention of deception.

For that reason, it is difficult to remove all the layers of this tragedy to arrive to any meaningful explanation. Perhaps, as Dr. Albert Hernández, interim president at Iliff School of Theology in Denver appropriately said, there are no explanations, and if there were explanations, they would be insufficient.

One of the issues that irritated me was the constant questions about why the massacre happened in Colorado. My answer was always the same: Why not? May God prevent any future massacres, not only in Colorado, but also all over the world.

Why we question and analyze the reasons to explain a massacre in Colorado, but we do not do the same when we hear about atrocities and killings in other places? Do we assume it is not OK for innocent people to be killed in Colorado, but it is OK for innocent people to be killed in Afghanistan or Mexico?

I was also irritated by the images that some people, perhaps as part of the mourning process, posted at social networking sites showing Batman crying. Batman does not cry, laugh, or suffer. He is a fictional character. But the people who died or got injured are real people.

There are so many levels to analyze and so many unanswered questions that I still do not understand what really happened.

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