HOLMES001 – Playing The Devil’s Advocate is like Playing with the Devil

The story you are about to read has been more than a decade in the making. Or, should I say, it’s been more than a decade lurking in the shadows of my subconscious, begging to be set free upon the world? Yes! That would be far more accurate of a description for how I feel right now. The story you are setting out to read now is intensely personal to me and one that I am both excited and nervous to begin sharing with you today. I’m excited because this series is going to serve as a way to get me one step closer to my goal of self-publishing a book on the subject which I have wanted to since the story first broke. But I’m also nervous because in sharing my innermost thoughts, questions and fears, I risk exposing myself to ridicule and scorn. People make fun of conspiracy theorists already. I’ve lived with that my entire life. But more importantly, people get seriously PISSED off at conspiracy theorists who are disrespectful to the dead, especially when children are involved. It was bad enough that children were involved with the shooting in Aurora, Colorado (a subject I tiptoed around) but it paled in comparison to the shooting that occurred later that year at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut (the Sandy Hook massacre). But once I was committed to going down the rabbit hole in Aurora there was no way I couldn’t get sucked in as well to the biggest mass shooting of the year.

My story starts relatively innocently enough. It was the summer of 2012 and I was feeling bored and looking for something to blog about because I enjoy writing a lot. I had a good friend at the time whom I was visiting regularly and he too fancied himself as a bit of a writer. Being that both of us enjoyed writing, we were interested in finding a topic we both could write about together in a blog format and so, over a steaming cup of coffee at a local Denny’s around midnight, we concocted a new idea for a joint blogging venture that would change the direction of my life and spin me down a very dark and potentially dangerous path of conspiracy and paranoia. One thing was for sure, the next couple of years were far from boring!

Our idea was simple enough. We would both watch the news faithfully looking for trending topics and news stories and identify ones that public opinion was pretty heavily set one way or another and then play devil’s advocate to that position. This meant that we’d be putting ourselves writing in favor of very unpopular opinions just for the sake of argument. Case in point, the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado that happened days after launching our site.

The shooting, which many dubiously named the “Batman shooting” happened July 20th, 2012 at a crowded theater during the premier of the new batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises”. The next day, as the story broke on all major news channels, everyone knew exactly what happened. A lone gunman by the name of James Eagan Holmes, entered the Colorado theater alone though a propped open back door and senselessly began firing into the crowded movie theater killing 12 and injuring 58 others. At the time, it was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history and it was an open and shut case as far as the nation was concerned. It seemed everyone knew exactly what happened. All that was left was to figure out why.

But was it really that simple?