Whowhatwhy.com with some controversial takes on recent events. Are we even allowed to question the official version?
The Marathon Bombing: What The Media Didn't Warn You About
With the media’s constant “coverage” of the Boston tragedy, it’s easy to think you are well- informed. But are you? Here is some perspective you probably didn’t get from your favorite mainstream outlet.

Just Asking: Media Outfoxed On Spate Of Bizarre Shootings?
Should the media line up behind a Fox News reporter facing jail time for her refusal to name sources? Of course. But they might also look into where reporters get those “scoops”—and how they shape public perceptions. Particularly in the cases of these “lone nut” shooters that have become increasingly common, leaks from law enforcement should not be taken at face value.

Documents in the Aurora shooting investigation were unsealed this week, and they show that James Holmes had been reported as a threat to campus police by the psychiatrist who treated him. However, she did not place him on a 72-hour psychiatric hold, according to the Denver Post.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and it's good that doctors don't use commitment lightly, but maybe this shooting could have been prevented:

CENTENNIAL — Thirty-eight days before the attack on the Century Aurora 16 movie theater, the psychiatrist treating suspect James Holmes told a police officer that her patient had confessed homicidal thoughts and was a danger to the public, according to newly unsealed court documents in the murder case against Holmes.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, also told the officer that Holmes had stopped seeing her and had been threatening her in text messages and e-mails, the documents state. The officer, Lynn Whitten, responded by deactivating Holmes' key-card access to secure areas of University of Colorado medical campus buildings, according to search warrant affidavits.

But the documents don't reveal what — if anything — campus authorities did to investigate Holmes until 38 days later, when 12 people were dead in the July 20 movie theater shootings, 58 more were injured by gunfire and

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Ever since the most recent shooting massacres, we've been subjected to wingnut pundits of every degree preaching how there were no gun laws that could have avoided them. Now The Nation's George Zornick looks at testimony from the trial of Aurora shooter James Holmes, and describes three very sensible, common-sense ways he could have been stopped:

Tracking large-scale ammunition purchases. Steve Beggs, an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, testified that Holmes went on a buying spree starting May 10, 2012. By July 14, he had bought 6,300 rounds of ammunition, two pistols, a .223 caliber Smith & Wesson AR-15 assault weapon, a shotgun, body armor, bomb-making materials and handcuffs.

The large-scale bullet purchases are the big red flag here. Nobody is monitoring bulk ammunition purchases: Some states, like Illinois, Massachusetts and New Jersey, have limits on the amount you can buy and ask that dealers track their sales for law enforcement, but Colorado has no such rules. And the ones that do exist can easily be evaded by buying ammunition online anyhow, which is what Holmes did.

The federal government should be able to track bulk ammunition sales—there is clearly a controlling public interest when somebody is assembling an arsenal that could support a small militia. If authorities had even briefly question Holmes about why he was stockpiling so many weapons, it’s almost a certainty they would have noticed his extremely bizarre behavior: He was reportedly almost incoherent in the weeks leading up to the attack. The White House is said to be considering a national database to track the sale and movement of weapons, and it should absolutely include ammunition, too.

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I read this, and I thought to myself, the cops are angry? They know what line of work they're in, they're always targets. How about the parents who sent their kids off to a midnight movie, and thanks to the NRA, have to plan their funerals?

AURORA, Colo. — The situation was literally explosive in this grieving Denver suburb Saturday as bomb experts disarmed the booby-trapped apartment of James Holmes, who police said spent months amassing explosives, weapons and ammunition and then walked into a movie theater early Friday and began shooting.

The failed neuroscience student, who is scheduled to appear in court Monday, remains an enigma — a young man who, despite troubles in academia so severe that he was quitting his graduate school program, showed no obvious sign of being on the brink of extreme violence.

The police chief, Dan Oates, said he and his officers felt targeted by the elaborate network of explosives in Holmes’s apartment.

“This apartment was designed, I say, based on everything I’ve seen, to kill whoever entered it,” Oates said at a news briefing. “It was gonna be a police officer, okay? Make no mistake about what was going on there. You think we’re angry, we sure as hell are angry.”

Aurora police said Saturday night that all explosives had been removed from the apartment and that FBI agents had gone inside to examine other evidence.

The protracted bomb-squad work at Holmes’s apartment took place on a day when Aurora residents learned the names of the 12 people killed and 58 wounded in the assault at the Century 16 movie theater, where a crowd of mostly young people showed up for the midnight screening early Friday of the new Batman film, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Among the dead were two members of the military, a man celebrating his 27th birthday and a 6-year-old girl, Veronica Moser-Sullivan, whose 25-year-old mother, Ashley Moser, is in critical condition and semiconscious with multiple gunshot wounds to her throat and abdomen.

There's going to be a lot of finger-pointing and hand-wringing in the coming days as we begin to process the awful tragedy that unfolded early this morning in Aurora, Colorado. In particular, it seems that right-wingers are eager to point fingers and are being hypersensitive about any suggestion of right-wing politics being even remotely involved in this case.

Of course, one of the foremost facets of events like these is that premature speculation is almost always wrong. It's wisest to let the facts emerge first, at which time we can begin making a rational appraisal of the event and its underlying causes. (We will, of course, be keeping a close eye on just what is in those "items of interest" found in the home of the suspect, James Eagan Holmes, since that will tell us a great deal.)

Unlike a lot of the talking heads out there, though, it seems silly to run and hide from the political dimensions of these kinds of tragedies, especially when it comes some of the broader social ramifications, most notably the role of the mass proliferation of handguns in American society that's occurred in recent years. Just ask folks in Seattle if that conversation isn't already under way here.

As Michael Grunwald says, there are always political dimensions to cases like this, and it's absurd not to deal with them forthrightly -- once, at least, the dust begins to settle and the facts begin to emerge.

Still, there are things that are clear even at the outset. Regardless of any ideological affiliation the Aurora gunman may have had (and I will at least observe that stockpiling armaments and bomb-making materiel is not usually the provenance of liberals, but is very common indeed among NRA-ginned-up gun nuts), one thing we can almost say definitively, given the cold brutality of the rampage, is that it seems highly likely that Holmes is either mentally ill or a psychopath.

Of course, mental illness has been cropping up as a factor in these tragic rampages, most notably in the Tucson rampage of Jared Loughner. Unfortunately, this seems to stop any and all further conversation of the subject, as though insanity is some kind of random X-factor that renders the acts of the insane utterly meaningless. This is, of course, an obscene cop-out.

However, given the skill and care with which Holmes clearly planned out this rampage and its aftermath (particularly in booby-trapping his own apartment), it seems far more likely that what we're dealing with here is a psychopath.

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