Guns and The Dark Knight Rises

After the Aurora shootings at a midnight The Dark Knight Rises premiere, is it time to talk about gun control? I hear conservatives say no. And there's no evidence that gun control could have stopped the killer from commiting his act.

The irony of all this is that Batman doesn't use guns. (MTV piece by Alex Zalben) He's not an executioner. We found that out in Batman Begins (2005) when he refused to execute a criminal that the League of Shadows wanted killed.
Maybe Batman's distaste for guns comes from seeing his parents being killed by a handgun. And by the way I'm talking about personal firearms not the cannons in the Batmobile or other vehicles. In The Dark Knight Rises, Director Christopher Nolan makes it a point that Batman doesn't use guns. In one scene, Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) wants to kill a Bane henchman and Batman (Christian Bale) stops her. He says no guns and says no killing. Later in a pivotal moment, there's a joke about using guns. Still, Batman won't use them.

But after the murder of innocent people at the theater, it's time to have a discussion about gun control. The Aurora shootings come a little more than eighteen months afer a crazed gunman tried to kill Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. (R-Arizona) Six people were killed in that mass murder. Why is it a problem to see if we can do anything to stop the carnage? Yes, gun control may not have stopped Aurora. Gun rights are not absolute. But is there a way we can limit the amount of lives lost by these gunmen? Yes. Limit the size of a rifle's magazine. It may not stop mass murder but we can save some lives by stopping a killer from having so many bullets for so many victims. It's not un-American to have reasonable gun control.