Holmes enters court with a dazed look

This incident is one of the most large-scale tragedies in the US for some time past. However, for all its tragic nature, this event, unfortunately, is not something very unusual for the US, a country where practically everyone can get a gun.

President Obama visited Denver and expressed his condolences to the wounded and to relatives and friends of those killed. However, neither Mr. Obama nor his main rival at the coming presidential elections, Mitt Romney, have said a single word about the law which allows everyone to have a gun, although this law is currently sharply criticized by many Americans.

James Holmes rushed into a theater called Aurora when the new movie of the Batman series was on. He pulverized tear gas in the hall and opened fire at the spectators.

After Holmes was arrested, the police found out that he had mined his flat.

The only thing that he has said to the investigators was that he was the Joker (the main evil character in the Batman series).

Holmes was also very silent during the trial, which gives grounds to suppose that he was under the influence of some psychotropic agent. This may be true if we take into account that earlier, he tried to commit suicide, after which he has been under the supervision of doctors.

James Holmes’s acquaintances characterize him as a well-educated person and even a talented scientist, who, however, has problems in communicating with people and prefers a secluded life. His actions are sometimes strange. Once, a landlady refused to rent out a flat to him because she found him “strange”, despite the fact that he, at that time, had never had any problems with law and had a good reputation. Moreover, when Holmes once tried to become a member of a club of shooters in Denver, he received a refusal because he had phoned the club and left a message with threats on the answering mashine.

The story of James Holmes’s crime is, in fact, very similar to those of many US criminals, from teenagers Dylan Bennet Klebold and Eric David Harris, who shot many their schoolmates in the same Colorado State in 1999, to Jared Lee Loughner, who attacked Senator Gabriel Giffords in 2011.

By the way, the school called Columbine, which was the site of Klebord’s and Harris’s crime, is only in several miles from the Aurora cinema. 13 years have passed since the tragedy in the Columbine school – and, now, a new similar tragedy happens in nearly the same place. However, during these 13 years, US laws concerning the selling of weapons even became milder.

Most likely, James Holmes is mentally ill. Now, a question arises: why does a law that allows maniacs like him to have fire weapons still exist in the US? This question can be addressed not only to US weapon producers and politicians who back them, but to President Obama as well.

It would be naïve to expect that Mitt Romney would once start to criticize this law. He is a member of the Republican Party, which backs the interests of several large weapon-producing companies. But it is strange that President Obama, during his speech in Denver right after the tragedy, didn’t say a word about his attitude towards this law.

Defenders of the freedom to have fire weapons claim that thanks to this freedom, the US became what it is now. Referring to the bygone centuries, this is probably true. But this doesn’t annul the fact that now, this “freedom” is obviously outdated.