Quick thought experiment. Imagine that the perpetrator of the Norway massacre, Anders Behring Breivik, hadn’t been a far-right “Christian fundamentalist.” Instead, he was named Hassan Ali Maqsud and he was an Islamic fundamentalist. Would we be hearing the same quick calls for more gun control? It took all of about seventeen minutes for the first advocates of more ‘common sense’ restrictions to pop their pointy little heads up and draw the conclusion that the real lesson of the shooting is that we need more restrictions on guns. It’s funny, but I don’t remember those same eminences calling for more gun laws after the Mumbai attack. Your thoughts?

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31 COMMENTS

  1. You sure there weren’t any calls at all to ban 5.7 AP rounds and high capacity assault clips?

  2. There are no lessons learnedthat you can draw for the United States after this incident. The Norwegian context is too different. For one think, this “rightwing extremist” means the opposite of what it means here. Brievik’s hero is the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance. He views the current government as the equivalent of the Quislings who are letting the Muslims (Nazis in his mind) take over the country. If you want to know why Brievik went nuts type in Malmo/rape into your favorite Internet search engine.

    By the way Norway already has highly restrictive “common sense” gun laws. This is a cautionary tale on the futility of gun restrictions.

  3. The reaction by the gungrabbers would be the same if Breivik was a Bhuddist named Won Hung Low and had killed a dozen people with an apple corer. The usual suspects would be making the usual whiney noises about the usual common-sense freedom controls that they favor above all things, including just plain common sense.

  4. Perhaps people consider India to be a “3rd World” country and are not shocked at obscene violence. Mumbia was also a political/religious attack, so tightening India’s highly restrictive gun laws would be useless. Norway’s tragedy shows once again that you cannot regulate crazy with more restrictions.

  5. Why are you calling him a “far right ‘Christian fundamentalist'”, when he states he is supportive of homosexuality and miscegenation?

    According to other web sites, his FaceBook page is fake, because it was clearly altered in his absence.

    I’ve seen his You Tube video and his FaceBook pages, both the “before” and “after” versions.

    I’m not sure WHAT this guy is.

    • I wrote the same thing about this guy yesterday. They have no clue who this guy is. It bothers me that the news provides assumptions and not facts.

    • That brings up fascinating possibilities. Was he a right wing christian or not? One thing we can all agree on is, at least I hope so, he was a gun nut. Now that doesn’t mean all gun enthusiasts are gonna do something like that. But it sure means some of them will.

      • Mike, will you please define “gun nut” for us. I’m sure there’s a belief here among the AI that, to you, all gun owners are gun nuts. Perhaps you can enlighten us?

  6. We can’t put people away for being crazy, because that would be mean even if they’re homicidal maniacs. But we can put them away for tax evasion. So I propose a Federal “Crazy Tax” that all crazy people would have to pay, with no exceptions.

    See, this is perfect because there are a lot of crazies out there, and the government can use the tax revenue for important things, like buying $30 thousand dollar automatic ass-wipers for the Congressional Men’s Toilet.

    The best thing is that it blows away the insanity defense. What, you didn’t pay the Crazy Tax because you’re crazy? Gotcha! We can’t try Jared Lee Loughner for mass murder charges because he’s crazy? Well, did he pay his Crazy Tax? No? Off to jail he goes.

    Why didn’t anybody think of this before? This could be bigger than shower carry.

  7. I’m not calling him a far-right Christian fundamentalist, the media are. As tdiinva pointed out, the left/right continuum in Europe is not necessarily analogous to what it is in the states.

    Also, the question had to do with the calls for more gun control in the US that have cropped up since the shooting. It’s pretty much a given that, virtually anywhere in Europe, there’s already much more stringent restrictions than we have here. I’m just waiting for the first leading light to blame the Norway shooting on Sarah Palin.

  8. Christofascist terrorism is the biggest threat to our nation. Unfortunately they have a wonderful marketing department.

  9. Does it really matter what his favorite flavor of arsenic kool-aid is? Lunatics will engage in lunacy. This cannot be avoided. What can be avoided is the obnoxious, and completely useless, finger pointing at Christians/Muslims/Right-wingers/Left-wingers/other-silly-distinctions-ad-nauseam.

    All we really need to know is that if someone attacks peaceable people who are minding their own business, then the attacker is a bad person. Seriously.

  10. No type of gun control law would have worked in this or any other case involving a crazy mass murderer. I’ve always said that gun control is hitting your target, which is exactly what this fool did. This moron used a bomb and gun and there’s no law or ban that could have stopped him.

    • Perhaps mental health screening would have identified him as so unstable as to be disarmed of his guns and his huge amounts of fertilizer. That’s what we need in the US. People have been saying it since Loughner. Mental health must be checked even if it means decimating the Armed Intelligentsia. (Before you get upset, please consider the literal meaning of decimate).

      • I might actually agree with you Mike, except that the definition of “mental health” is appallingly succeptable to political tinkering. Look at how many times various left-wing academics have described conservative beliefs as a mental illness. On the other side of the spectrum are people who think homosexuality and atheism are mental illnesses. It’s not like cancer or diabetes, where there’s a simple yes/no quality to the diagnoses. There’s way too much wiggle room for unscrupulous people to make the simple act of political opposition a diagnosed illness, and there’s no way I’m trusting the political class with that kind of discretion over a basic human right.

        And besides, the simple fact that this atrocity happened in a country with no 2nd Amendment and no real civilian gun ownership should show you how futile such a scheme would be, assuming your goal really was the prevention of criminal activity I mean.

        • To piggy back on your point James, I just read an article indicating that some of the top minds in business (CEO/CFO/COO’s etc) could be classified as sociopaths. They fit the psych profile and testing, but channel their energy into productive things rather than (violent) crime.

          Yet if we used a cookie cutter psych test these people would be disallowed from owning firearms…not to mention the risk that as you said various minorities and sub-cultures would likely be improperly singled out.

      • Mike needs to be intellectually honest, that no psychological test can’t predict or tell when someone is going to go over the edge; that there isn’t any guarantee that the federal government or any government would have evaluated him in time before this terrible crime was committed; that you can’t be fully 100% assured that any psychological test would’ve assured that the government test would’ve isolated him as a criminal.

        The fact is that bad things happen in the world. The fact is that 70+ people were killed by a crazy man with a gun, which is troubling and sad. And, the fact is you can’t throw everyone in prison because you “think” they may commit a crime.
        It took 90 minutes for the police to arrive.

        And, when seconds counted, the cavalry weren’t there when you needed them.

  11. Janet Reno…. uh i mean Napolitano says (I paraphrase) the terrorist we need to look for are white males, 30+, military veterans, persons with strong or even radical beliefs about Christianity and/or conservative philosophy.
    The gunman was or appears to be exactly that. Is not that more reason that all governments should consider disarming people that fit that profile.

  12. Breivik says the best source for guns is drug dealers. He went to Prague to buy his AK. Thee must be an “iron river” flowing between the Czech Republic and Norway.

    How is mikey going to save the world now?

  13. The early stories of events like this are usually erroneous. Remember the stories of “muslims” fleeing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City?

    Some questions: Anyone know the ethnic breakdown of his victims? I mean, if he hated immigrants and muslims, why would he shoot up a youth camp? Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to attack a mosque?

    And, the media has said that he prepared pictures and explanatory notes before he committed this atrocity. Unlike most mass-killers, he did not eat his gun or get killed by police (who allegedly took 90 minutes to respond). The police have said (according to the media) that he is talking.

    This whole tragedy just doesn’t add up. It certainly doesn’t fit any of the stereotypical narratives that the media tries to shoehorn onto tragedies.

    • My acquaintance from Finland, who currently in Norway, pursuing his business interests, told me, that his Norwegian acquaintance (business partner, that it) told him, that that camp is… ehm… “not for natives Norwegians”.
      Upd. Just for “clarity” – we discussed that camp several years ago. So it may be not correct for present time.

    • “The early stories of events like this are usually erroneous. Remember the stories of “muslims” fleeing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City?”

      If it’s so “usual” then why did you have to go back sixteen years to find an example? What happens far, far more often is that the perpetrators are animated by radical Islam and the MSM bends over backwards not to report that tiny little fact because they don’t want to “jump to conclusions”, no matter how obvious the conclusion is to someone looking rationally at the situation.

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