This is a relatively short post, as I don’t currently have time to address some of the larger issues, like what should be the response when someone who shares at least some of the same beliefs you do commits a heinous act. Just as the violence of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry did not automatically invalidate the moral underpinnings of the anti-slavery cause, Anders Behring Breivik’s rampage does not automatically invalidate concerns about the Islamization of Europe.
Police have lowered the death toll to 76.
Mark Steyn, one of the authors Breivik quotes in his manifesto (along with “Churchill, Gandhi, Orwell, Jefferson, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Bernard Shaw, [and] Mark Twain”) comments with his usual eloquence. “When a Norwegian man is citing Locke and Burke as a prelude to gunning down dozens of Norwegian teenagers, he is lost in his own psychoses. Free societies can survive the occasional Breivik. If Norway responds to this as the Left appears to wish, by shriveling even further the bounds of public discourse, freedom will have a tougher time.”
Bruce Bawer, who lives in Oslo, makes a number of important points about the shabby treatment of Jews in Norway, and how the current government has played footsie with Islamic terrorism and squelched criticism of Islam.
Bawer also had this to say in The Wall Street Journal: “Several of us who have written about the rise of Islam in Europe have warned that the failure of mainstream political leaders to responsibly address the attendant challenges would result in the emergence of extremists like Breivik.”
Geert Wilders, probably the leading European opponent of Islamization, called Breivik “violent and sick” and said that he and his Freedom Party “abhors all that Breivik represents and has done.”
Powerline: “A key ingredient in the tragedy was the fact that the killer had the only gun on the island.”
If you’re really a right-winger, why would you want to copy large chunks of your manifesto from the Unabomber?
Furthering the weird-conspiracy theory vibe of Breivik being a Freemason, he also considered himself a member of the Knights Templer. It’s like he was trying to live out a Dan Brown novel.
This Telegraph piece on the shooting contains many interesting tidbits, including the fact that one of the people killed on Utoya was an off-duty police officer and half-brother of Norway’s Princess Mette-Mari.
Differences between conservatives and Jihadists: Jihadists celebrate such acts of violence, conservatives condemn them.
There’s been a lot of interest in what sort of weapon Breivik used. Though police have not released any details on what weapons were involved in his killing spree, in line with some comments here, Breivik appeared to own a Ruger Mini-14 and a Glock 17. The Ruger Mini-14 may be the gun shown here:
Though one knowledgeable emailer thinks it could just as easily be an AR-15 or an AK-47 with mounting rails, tricked out with what appears to be a mount (more below), a light, a bayonet, and maybe a laser sight? Though you don’t often see one mounted so far off the center line. He’s got so much tactical bling on there it looks like he’s trying to win a contest for Most Crap Mounted Off a Forward Rail. Seems deeply impractical. Though if it was tricked out like that during his rampage, obviously it wasn’t impractical enough.
Dwight located what appears to be the actual mount shown in that picture: the Botech Tactical Grip Pod Automatic Tactical BiPod Foregrip. As the animation on the product page illustrates, the two parts of the bipod telescope out to a standard bipod, making it a lot less useless than it seems in the picture.
I’m not enough of a gun expert to tell you what the light, scope, etc. shown are. Feel free to comment below if you do.
The Ruger Mini-14 Tactical Rifle fires 5.56mm NATO/.223 Remington, which is the same cartridge usually used in other “assault rifles” like the AR-15 and the M-16.
The Glock-17, despite some media scare-mongering, is a solid, reliable, bog-standard 9mm automatic pistol notable only for lighter weight achieved through the use of composites.
Both will indeed kill you quite dead in the hands of a knowledgeable shooter. Then again, wearing a police uniform, alone on an island with unarmed teenagers for more than an hour, Breivik probably could have killed just about as many with a bolt-action M1903 Springfield rifle.