Prosecutors in Colorado have announced that they will be seeking the death penalty for the guy who killed 12 and wounded 70 at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises last summer. Sorry about the picture, I’m trying to type his name and show his face as little as possible.

Prosecutors said Monday that they will seek the death penalty for James Holmes, the man accused of gunning down 12 people and wounding 70 at a Batman movie last summer in Colorado.
George Brauchler, the district attorney for Arapahoe County, said he made the decision after speaking with more than 800 victims and family members.
“It’s my determination and my intention that in this case, for James Eagan Holmes, justice is death,” he said at a hearing.
Brauchler had already rejected an offer from the defense to let Holmes plead guilty and serve a life sentence.
Judge William Sylvester of the Colorado circuit court entered a plea of not guilty for Holmes last month after his lawyers said they were not ready to plead. The judge left the door open for lawyers to mount an insanity defense.
Sylvester on Monday handed the case to a new judge, Carlos Samour. Holmes’ trial is scheduled to begin Aug. 5.
Brauchler wrote an Op-Ed in The Denver Post over the weekend defending the death penalty. Colorado legislators have considered banning it. He did not name Holmes but wrote of capital punishment as an important tool of justice.
“Repealing the death penalty would result in acts similar to those in Newtown, Conn., or the acts of Tim McVeigh being punished no differently than a single murder of one gang member by another,” the prosecutor wrote. “Each murder after the first would be a freebie.”
Injection is the method for capital punishment in Colorado. The state has executed only one inmate since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in the United States in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. That execution was in 1997.
Holmes’ lawyers have said that jailers determined he was a danger to himself and needed a mental evaluation, and that he was held for several days in a psychiatric ward, sometimes in restraints. [MSNBC]

Regardless of how you feel about the death penalty, I think we can all agree that this is one of the most tasteless April Fool’s pranks of all time.

A 20-year-old from Missouri is in jail after confessing that he’d been planning to shoot up a theater showing The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 over the weekend. Blaec Lammers (above, with the righteous goat and sick star tat) was arrested at a hamburger joint after his mom tipped off police in Bolivar, MO, that he’d gone off his meds and she thought he was planning an Aurora-style shooting. It’s a good thing she did, but let’s not minimize her culpability in this. She was after all the one who named him “Blaec Lammers.” Civilization starts to break down when you can’t spell your own kid’s name.

Bolivar police have released a probable-cause statement that details the unlikely events.

According to the release, Lammers’ mother contacted authorities Thursday, expressing concern about her son’s possible plans. Soon, an officer approached Lammers at a hamburger restaurant and he was taken into custody.

“Blaec Lammers and I then began talking about recent shootings that have been in the news. Blaec Lammers stated that he had a lot in common with the people that have been involved in those shootings. Blaec Lammers state that he was quiet, kind of a loner, had recently purchased firearms and didn’t tell anybody about it, and had homicidal thoughts. Blaec Lammers further stated that he had purchased the firearms with the intentions of shooting up the movie theater in Bolivar.”

Lammers apparently had bought a ticket to a Twilight screening on Sunday, but worried that he’d run out of ammunition and decided to shoot up a Walmart instead.

“Blaec Lammers stated he would walk into the store and just start shooting people at random and if he ran out of ammunition (he said he purchased 400 rounds) he would just break the glass where the ammunition is being stored and get some more and keep shooting until the police arrived. Blaec Lammers stated he would then turn himself into police when they arrived.”

Talk about free advertising for Walmart. “And if it turned into a hostage situation, we could survive for weeks on the bargain basement groceries!”

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The drug cartel wars in Mexico have killed as many as 60,000 people in the last six years (!!) so you might expect Mexicans to be a little jaded when it comes to murder. But just how jaded? Well, a 10-year-old was shot in the head and killed during a Wreck-It Ralph screening last week, and after they carted him out, THEY KEPT PLAYING THE REST OF THE MOVIE.

According to an ongoing police investigation and local media reports, the shooting occurred Nov. 2 while young Hendrik Cuacuas, accompanied by his father and sister, were watching the animated Disney film Wreck-It-Ralph in a southern Mexico City theater.

The boy’s father, Enrique Cuacuas, told investigators and radio station Radio W that the child was sitting on his right side in a full theater when about a half-hour into the screening he heard something whiz past his ear, followed by the sound of a thud. He then turned to his right and saw his son convulsing and bleeding from the head. At that point, he realized his son had been shot. The boy was rushed to a hospital in critical condition but died two days later.

An autopsy report revealed that the child was shot from a distance of about four to six feet and it said the bullet entered the front of his head. However, adding to the general confusion, the coroner was quoted as saying that the shooter was not necessarily standing in front of the victim. [Or maybe it was the chupacabra. What am I, a doctor?]

Even stranger, the boy’s father and others in the theater said they heard no gunshots. Without offering proof, Cuacuas told Radio W that he learned there had been similar incidents in the past in the same theater. [THR]

Sad yet? Oh, it gets worse.

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What you get when you search "gun" and "dumb" on Shutterstock. Oh to have been a fly on the wall during this shoot.

Ever since the Aurora theater massacre, people have felt an acute need to protect themselves when they head to the theater, and that means guns. Problem is, most guns have a design flaw in that popcorn butter makes the handle really slippery. Police have yet to say whether popcorn butter was a factor in the latest accidental theater shooting in Nevada, when a man accidentally shot himself in the butt during The Bourne Legacy, but I think we can speculate.

SPARKS, Nev. – Police say a man accidentally shot himself in the buttocks at a Nevada movie theatre during a showing of “The Bourne Legacy.”
Police in Sparks, Nev., say the 56-year-old man’s injuries are not life-threatening and no others were hurt.
Authorities say the man had a permit to carry a concealed firearm. The man told officers the gun fell from his pocket Tuesday night as he was adjusting himself in the seat and that it discharged when it dropped to the floor. [Yahoo/AP]

Yikes, what did he have to do to get that concealed firearm permit, bring in a special edition Pepsi can to any participating location? One would hope that accidentally shooting yourself in public is grounds for revoking a conceal-and-carry permit. Tough luck for that guy. On the plus side, if Hollywood needs to cast a Jack Ryan in their next round of Tom Clancy movies, I think they know who to call.