Sonny Bunch noted that one of the movie-theater chains that pulled out, Cinemark, is still dealing with liability cases related to the 2012 shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, theater during The Dark Knight Rises. Cinemark had freely offered to pay for any funeral expenses incurred by families that were not already covered by a Crime Victim’s Compensation fund. But the case brought by the families of the victims is that the theater should have had security adequate to the task of defeating a lunatic equipped with smoke canisters and a Smith & Wesson M&P15 semi-automatic rifle.
In this way we transfer our moral intuition that an event like this “should never happen” into an immoral presumption that some proximate rich entity (a person or corporation, likely with liability insurance), was somehow responsible for preventing any such tragedy, no matter how novel or improbable. Judges that have refused to throw out the case have argued that perhaps movie theaters should anticipate mass shootings as a matter of course.
Frankly, no one should want to live in a society where an attack like James Holmes’ is considered just as “foreseeable” as a grease fire in a restaurant kitchen. Just as the latter requires a fire extinguisher, should all movie showings be done on lockdown after everyone passes through metal detectors and body-scanners? No, cinema companies should not be put in a corner by liability lawyers over a previously implausible threat. A desperate lunge against any conceivable disaster scenario is pathological and dangerous. It makes us tyrants.
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