The Dark Knight Rises shows CANCELLED

After the theater shooting during a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, some theaters cancelled the movie's showings in other parts of the world, including Paris, France.

My question is, why?

Mass shooting deaths have occurred at places such as schools, shopping malls, political events, and now a movie theater. These places have in common a shared characteristic: that they are gathering places with large numbers of people. This is all. However, when the shooting death occurs at a place like a political event or a movie theater, people are quick to look at the movie it happened at or the politics of the person having the rally and say: did these particular politics cause this person to go crazy? Did this particular movie cause the individual to start killing? These are not fair questions. Nor are they reasonable. If we were to cancel schools each time there was a school shooting, or shut down all malls each time there was a mall shooting, or to ban movies based on a movie shooting; this would be illogical.

I do not believe movies are specific triggers for mental episodes or outbreaks of mass violence, but that this is a specific example of the logical fallacy of correlation being confused with causation. See this wikipedia page for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

When you have a population with a significant amount of individuals with mental instability, and these individuals have access to unrestricted access to weapons, you statistically will have a certain risk of these incidents per year; where or when they occur should not be the main topic of discussion. Such things are minutia, and speculative; we can never know what goes on inside the mind of one who is mentally ill.

The main topic of discussion should rather be how to better treat and identify such individuals with mental health concerns and how best to encourage those with mental health concerns to come forward and seek treatment without being penalized or stigmatized.  One of the many reasons we desperately need a cohesive, effective healthcare system where patients can consistantly obtain their medication and do not have to fear losing their insurance is so that those with a mental health condition do not end up on the street, or in a movie theater, at a midnight showing, carrying guns.

Thanks: M Monica