While some choose to debate about gun control or the state of healthcare for the mentally ill, other stalwart truthseekers have made it their mission to get to the bottom of James Holmes' massacre at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises.

On his blog, Denver pastor Brad Strait recounts a rather remarkable "miracle story" involving 22-year-old Petra Anderson, a congregant at his church and one of the 71 people shot last Friday at a Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.

By contrasting the ease with which Aurora shooter James Holmes ordered guns and ammunition online with the rapid FBI response when a Muslim would-be terrorist in Aurora sent a single suspicious email a few years ago, Denver Post columnist Chuck Murphy states the obvious in his column today: this mass shooting might have turned out very differently if James Holmes had been named Ibrahim or Mohammed.

The homemade explosives, incendiary liquid containers, and jugs full of bullets inside James Holmes booby-trapped apartment "show the intensity and focus" of the 24-year-old suspected of perpetrating the largest mass shooting in American history.

Appearing on CNN's State of the Union to discuss the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper said that "act[s] of evil" are not necessarily preventable with stricter gun control laws.

As families of the Aurora shooting victims have been notified, some of the victims' names and stories have been released.

"First responders to the Aurora theater shooting at first thought the shooter was a fellow officer, and the shooter had taken 100mg of Vicodin about two and half hours before the shooting, according to information from sources." [ABC 7 News Denver]

Dark Knight shooting suspect James Holmes graduated in 2010 with honors from the University of California, Riverside, where he majored in neuroscience. University Chancellor Tim White remembers Holmes as a brilliant student.

Earlier this evening, The Dark Knight Rises director Christopher Nolan issued the following statement regarding the Dark Knight shooting in Colorado:

A shooter walked into a late-night showing of The Dark Knight Rises early Friday morning in Aurora, Colo., and opened fire. James Holmes, 24, killed 12 and wounded dozens more. Read our initial report here and catch up on the following stories on the Dark Knight shooting:

Authorities have identified 24-year-old James Holmes as the man who entered a Colorado movie theater early Friday morning and opened fire on a crowded screening of The Dark Knight. That's him above, in a photo from CU, where he was a student.

At long last, incontrovertible proof that LMFAO is destroying the youth of America.

Here's the best space video we've ever seen: 18 time-lapse sequences of photos taken from the International Space Station, gorgeously processed and edited by Michael König. There's so much going on it's hard to know where to focus while you watch—the North and Southern Lights? The flickers of lightning in the clouds? The cobwebs of settlement light stretching across continents? A list of the locations being passed over can be found here; the first two sequences were taken above the United States. We published a similar video a few months ago, but this one's the real deal. [via Kottke]

[As the space stuff from this weekend's gigantic solar burp rained down on earth, parts of northern Europe—including Norway—were treated to beautiful aurorae. Photo via Bjorn Li Photo.]

Noted neologician Jesse James Garrett, the man who dubbed a set of popular Web 2.0 technologies "Ajax," has announced another project from Adaptive Path, the Web consultancy he cofounded. It's Aurora, an interesting visualization of what a next-generate Web browser might look like. It's user-interface porn of the highest order, with a special bonus if you have a farmer fetish. What the company hasn't announced? The recent departure of COO Bryan Mason, pictured here, who Twittered his resignation on Friday, though he hasn't been filed under "emeritus" on the company roster quite yet. Whoever is named the new COO had better make sure the free-taco truck tradition at the annual company party continues, or there will be hungry-hipster hell to pay. The Aurora browser: