Not the Joker; not Batman. .
He was (is) a horrifyingly real person, this deranged individual who took a dozen lives during a 12:01 a.m. screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado.
“I don’t want to know this man’s name,” Dan Slott posted early Friday on Twitter. “I don’t want him to gain any kind of notoriety. He should vanish from history.”
Like a lot of people, I’m with Slott, and I won’t be referring to the perpetrator by name here. Even the least sensationalized news of the shooting has to do just that as a matter of factual reporting, of course — the kind of reporting, sadly, that was in short supply early on, leading to erroneous associations on the part of more than one news outlet between the shooter and political movements on both sides of the spectrum.
