Batman has always been my hero. Superman was great, but he was a God as much as a Hero, which made him hard to relate to—he was more fun to observe in Action (pardon the pun). But Batman’s ‘power’ was that he never touched a gun. Psychology was his other ‘power’—he took the fact that bullies are cowards and turned it into a defensive advantage—he fought the criminals he happened upon, but he frightened all of them.

Since he was the first superhero to be camped-up and ridiculed by the entertainment industry, I was inured to others’ ridicule of my hero at an early age. Batman, the icon, was the product of the comic book domain, a never-never land of the isolated bookworms and thrill-seekers of my 1960s childhood. He had a utility belt (another Batman ‘power’) and an orphaned acrobat sidekick, he lived in Wayne Manor; he had a Bat-cave and a Bat-mobile, and a butler, Alfred.

More often than not, Batman surprised his criminal prey ‘in the act’ at a bank or museum or laboratory, subdued them all with hand-to-hand combat, and left them trussed up for the police (a great way to sidestep the complications of Batman’s questionable vigilantism).

I watched the Batman TV series against my will—it was ‘Batman’, so I had to watch—but—the way they depicted the darkly serious hero as a joke offended my love of the iconic character. And there was plenty for the young boy to admire in those comics—Batman worked in secret, he didn’t brag; Batman never used firearms or explosives—indeed, he never killed anyone either, only subdued them for capture; Batman was even a hero in his secret identity—the millionaire philanthropist, Bruce Wayne.

No mention was ever made of the difference Batman made to citywide crime statistics, if any—he was simply a lone ranger (but without the six-shooters). His quest for justice was a personal battle he fought both with criminals and with himself—a crusader for good. Compared to the actual ‘Crusaders’ of medieval Europe, he was a saint—no conquest, rape, or pillage—none of that stuff.

Now the future is today—both my early love of science fiction and of comic book heroes have been proved irresistibly popular—our TV series’s (even a whole TV channel) dwell on every aspect of science fiction imagined so far. They were led there by the blockbuster movies than began with Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and continue up to today’s premiere of “The Rise Of Batman”. This was, by my count but don’t quote me, the eighth major motion picture featuring Batman, and still it has been mobbed with eager theater-goers, the first day of a week-end rush that was on deck to break ‘week-end gross’ records.

And now this horrible tragedy occurrs in a Colorado movie-theater leaving fifty people with large-caliber gunshot wounds, over ten of them fatally! The psychopath allegedly entered the theater normally, propped open an exit door, returned to his vehicle to don bullet-proof armor and take up three different firearms, and then walked back into the theater, tossed a tear-gas grenade into the crowd, and opened fire at the audience members.

He was apparently emulating the late Heath Ledger’s “Joker” character from the last big Batman picture. His home was wired with booby-traps and the police spent a lot of time entering safely into the apartment. Aside from his bullet-proofing ‘armor’, nothing about this tragedy has any real connection to Batman, the character, other than choosing a Batman premiere as his location.

And now, being a pessimist, I fully expect an avalanche of thoughtless verbiage about the darkness of the Batman franchise—which was only a scare tactic to use against bullies and crooks in the original comics. It was Tim Burton who chose to make Gotham City a place of darkness as well. Then Heath Ledger’s director apparently wanted some realism in the Joker’s psychopathology, which made the bad guys even scarier than Batman—an almost complete reversal of the original theme.

So I just want to throw in my two cents on the whole issue of ‘lone gunman massacres Batman movie audience’ before the shouting begins over this non-issue. The issue is the crazy person who shot at innocent people in a theater. If there is any blame to be attached to the movie’s franchise, I only hope that people will realize that it isn’t Batman that’s a bad influence, it is the fault of the movies based on Batman that are connecting somehow to this psychopath’s delusions. Batman, himself, remains the world’s finest Boy Scout (again, p the p).

These crazy shooters are worse than any criminal, or at least, as bad as the worst (seeing as how the two become one at some point). They were not raised, they were neglected. No one goes that crazy unless they are ignored for years and years before. Even the apparently normal child of normal parents that suddenly turns into something unrecognizably evil—even those will show signs of a predisposition towards cruelty, somewhere along the line. If their parents didn’t ignore them, they certainly ignored all the tell-tale signs of psychosis.

I’ll accept, for the sake of argument, that some people might just ‘snap’, and turn into frenzied killers, without any link to their past or their upbringing. But there are, if I haven’t been misinformed, always some signs of warning that a perceptive and sensitive person could have gleaned while living in the same house with a young and developing psychotic. Some of the backstories in real-life disasters, especially schools shootings, are as chilling as the crimes.

All that aside, there seems to be a very familiar pattern to the vast majority of these disasters. Kids being hurt, or ignored, or both, by parents (or other family or authority-figures) whose emotional stability isn’t very strong, either—and kids being bullied and ostracized by their peers without any interference from concerned adults, especially parents and schoolteachers—these young people are driven to become cold-blooded monsters.

People are animals—we are born as animals—we learn to be humane by examples set by our parents and others. When these examples are absent from a child’s experience, it figures their behavior is going to be asocial, which is easily converted to anti-social by the mistreatment they receive.

Most of our social progress has been a story of breaking down imaginary boundaries—of seeing high-born equal to peasant, of seeing colored persons equal to Caucasian persons, of seeing women as equals of men, and on and on. But the newest fight, the fight against bullying, is special. Before, the arguments were always about ignoring prejudice, but the fight against bullying is a fight to pay more attention to children—not just our own, but all of them. We are not being asked to forget old barriers; we are called upon to remember how important children are. And how easily they can turn on each other without a minimum of demonstrations of humane behavior. Daily witnessing of people being good to each other is the only safe way to rear children.

So, my message is as follows: Ignore the movie’s title, and keep your focus on the fact that some miserable soul was tormented into becoming a mass murderer and—sympathy and condolences to the victims’ families.