I can't decide what I find more frightening - the notion that a man could go to the movies with his wife and be shot dead in the middle of the theater by a man in the row behind him, or the fact that in the aftermath of this horror show the national discourse seems to be about the ramifications of texting during a movie.
Let me tell you something about Curtis Reeves. He was a disaster waiting to happen. A 71-year-old man, walking around with a concealed weapon and the legally sound idea in his mind that if, at any moment, he should perceive a threat, he is within his right to shoot to kill. This is a recipe for tragedy.
That anyone is discussing whether Chad Oulson should have left the theater to text his daughter boggles my mind. This has absolutely nothing to do with the massive problem we are facing as a country. People behave badly sometimes. In grocery stores, in movie theaters, in parking lots - you name it. Somehow we have given our citizens the idea that killing others is an acceptable way to respond to a mild nuisance - as long as you can pretend that you were afraid. How far away are we from someone claiming he feared a mother of three was going to use her minivan as a weapon as she swooped in to a parking spot he was waiting for? If Reeves could be so quick to draw his weapon and use it lethally, why would anyone assume that he wouldn't have done so had someone stepped on his foot on the way to the bathroom?
In the wake of the horror in Newtown and the myriad of other mass shootings we have lived through over the course of the last few years, the NRA would have us believe that the answer to the situation is more guns. The saying I've heard over and over is that "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Well, thank you Curtis Reeves for showing us exactly why that argument is a dangerous one and should be dismissed immediately. Curtis Reeves was supposed to be one of the good guys. And you know who he stopped? A 43-year-old father who made the mistake of wanting to see a movie in the middle of the day. And you know why? Because we've allowed him to think it was what he was entitled to do.
There is only one thing that could have and would have stopped Curtis Reeves from killing Chad Oulson on January 13th: not having a gun. It's as simple as that. A fight may have begun, punches may have been thrown, two grown men may have been thrown out of a movie. But no one would be dead.
