More Oslo Shooting Fallout (and Some Notes on Breivik’s Guns)

July 25th, 2011

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.

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    Posted in Crime, Guns, Jihad | 6 Comments »

    Texas Senate Race Spending: A Look at This Point In Previous Cycles

    July 25th, 2011

    Now that half the fundraising year has passed, I wanted to take a look at how the funds raised this year compare to this point in years past.

    Unfortunately, it’s been so long since there’s been a competitive regular Republican Senate primary in Texas (I’m discounting the special election of 1993 because it’s difficult to compare special elections to regular elections) that it’s hard to find a precedent for that side of the race. John Cornyn had no serious competition in 2002. Indeed, you’d have to go back to Beau Boulter vs. Wes Gilbreath in 1988 for a truly competitive regular Texas Republican senatorial primary. And the main FEC page doesn’t go back before 1999.

    So let’s look at the Democratic side of the race, where there’s a lot more precedent for an open race. While my initial assessment of Ricardo Snachez’s $160,000 was it was about what you’d expect given his late start, it seems disappointing in light of what previous Democratic senatorial candidates were able to raise.

    2008 Senate Race

    For the 2008 race against John Cornyn, trail lawyer Mikal C. Watts had already raised over $3 million by July of 2007, mostly through self-funding. What, you never heard of Watts? That might be because, despite his financial firepower, he dropped out of the race before the primary. Why? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that letters came out showing him pressuring litigation targets to settle by bragging about how much money he had contributed to appellate judges who would hear the case:

    “This court is comprised of six justices, all of whom are good Democrats,” Watts wrote. “The Chief Justice, Hon. Rogelio Valdez, was recently elected with our firm’s heavy support, and is a man who believes in the sanctity of jury verdicts.”

    The letter goes on to name Justices Errlinda Castillo, Nelda Rodriguez, J. Bonner Dorsey, Federico Hinojosa and Linda Yanez, and says his firm also has financially supported them.

    Strangely enough, this was seen as injuring his election chances, and he dropped out in October. Sanchez might take comfort in the fact that eventual Democratic nominee Rick Norgiega, didn’t even file his paperwork until July 11 of 2007, and that he eventually raised over $4 million. Or it would be comforting, if not for the fact that Cornyn raised $13 million and beat him by 12 percentage points despite the Obama wave in 2008.

    2006 Senate Race

    In the 2006 election cycle, eventual Democratic nominee (and yet another trial lawyer) Barbara Ann Radnofsky had already raised $355,218 by April 5, 2005. By July 5, 2005, she would amass a total of just under half a million dollars. By the time the race was done, she would raise just shy of $1.5 million, and, despite it being a Democratic wave election year, Kay Baily Hutchison would raise over $6 million and would wallop her 61.7% to 36%.

    2002 Senate Race

    Eventual Democratic nominee Ron Kirk didn’t even file his first campaign report until December 7, 2001, and still managed to raise over $9 million for the race. Kirk was part of the Democratic Party’s 2002 “Dream Team” along with Tony Sanchez and John Sharp: One black, one Hispanic, and one white all running serious, well-funded, top of the ticket campaigns in a year in which the party out of the White House usually does well. They all lost. Kirk did better than Sanchez (losing to Rick Perry), but worse than John Sharp (losing to David Dewhurst).

    By the way, Tony Sanchez spent $60 million of his own money for the privilege of getting creamed by Rick Perry, who took over 60% of the vote, thus disproving two theories beloved by political consultants (money is everything, and the Hispanic vote will make Democrats in Texas competitive Real Soon Now) in one fell swoop.

    Conclusion

    Ricardo Sanchez’s military background gives him several distinct advantages other Democratic candidates have not had, but quick access to significant campaign funds is not among them. Certainly the pay for Lieutenant (three star) General in the united States Army isn’t chickenfeed (about $143,000 a year), but it’s far short of what he would need to self-finance his campaign. Financially, Sanchez’s campaign is going to suffer from him not being a trial lawyer, or, well, Ron Kirk, who was (and presumably still is) amazingly well-connected in both business and Democratic political circles.

    Ricardo Sanchez is already behind where most recent Texas Democratic senatorial candidates were during this part of the fundraising cycle. And all of them lost.

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    Norway Shooter Anders Behring Breivik: Deadlier and Weirder

    July 23rd, 2011

    The case of alleged Oslo bomber and Utoya island shooter Anders Behring Breivik gets stranger. The only constant seems to be that whatever I say about him in this post is likely to be proven wrong by the time I put up the next:

  • This does not seem to be an act of Islamic terrorism (despite the claim of responsibility by Ansar al-Islam).
  • The death toll is now being reported as 92, despite my earlier incredulity. That would make Breivik the deadliest spree shooter/active shooter in the history of the world.

    • How did he manage to kill so many? Evidently Breivik was dressed as a policeman and had an hour and a half to carry out his spree, since the real police couldn’t even reach the island for 40 minutes. (Remember, when seconds count, the police are minutes away.)

    Why didn’t anyone shoot back? Because in Norway, though they have much laxer gun control laws than the rest of Europe, self defense “is practically never accepted as a reason for gun ownership.” And weapons cannot be carried loaded.

    Why did he do it? A lot of reports say he’s a “right-wing extremist” and/or an “anti-immigration/anti-Muslim” extremist.

    There are translations of some of his writings/Internet posts up. A quick skim does show an anti-multiculturalism/anti-Muslim immigration bias. How killing Norwegian children furthers that cause is unclear. If anything, his killing spree would probably damage the cause of opposing the Islamization of Europe.

    Is he crazy? Well, you have to be crazy and/or evil to open fire on a group of children, but even in translation his writings don’t have the rambling, impenetrable quality that Jared Lee Loughner’s screeds have. To me it seems like that Breivik will be found sane and face the maximum penalty.

    Which, in Norway, is 21 years in jail. Or less than 3 months a murder.

    Here are the top twelve search terms for people reaching my blog today:

    anders behring breivik black metal
    anders behring breivik metal
    anders behring breivik jew
    anders breivik black metal
    anders behring breivik freemason
    anders behring breivik opus dei
    anders behring breivik jewish
    anders behring breivik “black metal”
    anders behring black metal
    anders behring breivik convert
    anders behring breivik muslim convert

    Uh folks, most of those terms were included in my post as a joke

    There’s the problem with conspiracy theories: Evidently a conspiracy can be behind any evil action, even those that don’t appreciably advance the interests of said conspiracy. I cannot for the life of me see how shooting Norwegian schoolchildren would further the cause of either the Pope or the Elders of Zion in taking over the world. [Just to be clear: Pope=Real guy, no particular plan for world domination beyond proselytizing, Elders of Zion=fake Jewish conspiracy group created by the Czar’s secret police and regurgitated by every brain-dead anti-semite since. I wouldn’t think you would need to explain these things, but those search stats above and some recent comments suggest otherwise…]

    The black metal reference was a half-joke, since the early Norway black metal scene did result in a rash of church burnings back in the 1990s, and a government building bombing wouldn’t be a giant leap. (The lads seemed to have calmed down a bit since, though Varg Vikernes, the black metal musician convicted not only of arson, but also of murdering a band-mate, was released from prison in 2009. Remember that 21 year limit? Vikernes served 16 years.)

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    Posted in Crime, Guns | 7 Comments »

    New York Times “80 Dead” Number in Oslo Shooting Almost Certainly Wrong

    July 22nd, 2011

    The New York Times is reporting 80 dead in the shooting spree attributed to Anders Behring Breivik. That’s almost certainly a mistranslation or a wild exaggeration. While theoretically possible, it would make him not only far and away the most deadly “active shooter” ever, but the death toll for his victims would be higher than that of Texas Tower Sniper Charles Whitman, Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho and Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold combined.

    I’m not buying it.

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    Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Media Watch | No Comments »

    Norway Shooter Anders Behring Breivik is a…What?

    July 22nd, 2011

    Norwegian police are fingering Anders Behring Breivik as the bomber/shooter. Some are saying he’s a Right Wing Extremist (though what that means in a Norwegian context I’m not clear on). Some are saying that he’s a Norwegian Christian Conservative (which ruins my idea that he may be a fan of Norwegian Black Metal), and even a Freemason. What a blast from the past if that’s true. The conspiracy theory nuts are going to have to start dusting off their old Albert Pike and C. W. Leadbeater books. Next we’re going to hear that Breivik is a Jew, a Reptoid, and a member of both Opus Dei and the Trilateral Commission.

    But right now, despite Ansar al-Islam’s claim of responsibility and past Jihadest attempts in Norway, I’m not seeing anyone claim that Breivik is a convert to Islam.

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    Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Jihad | 3 Comments »

    Oslo Bombing Update: 7 Dead, Ansar al-Jihad Takes Responsibility, More Shot at Youth Camp

    July 22nd, 2011

    So it was Ansar al-Jihad, as predicted by Jihadwatch.

    Now at least four more appear to be at a most-likely related shooting at a Youth camp.

    Remember, the only thing unusual about the Norway attacks is the location. Islamic terrorism kills this many people in other places around the globe pretty much every single day.

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    Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Jihad | 2 Comments »

    Giant Explosion Rocks Norway. Jihad-Related?

    July 22nd, 2011

    Fox News is reporting one person dead and several injured.

    JihadWatch is saying that the explosion might possibly be related to terror charges against Mullah Krekar, founder of the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam.

    Norway had declared Krekar a danger to national security, but is refusing to have him deported to Iraq. Why? Because he could be subject to the death penalty.

    More details as they occur.

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    Posted in Crime, Foreign Policy, Jihad | 1 Comment »

    Stanley Garza, Another Longshot Democrat, Joins the Senate Race

    July 21st, 2011

    Sean Hubbard now has company in the “Declared Democratic candidates sure to be ignored by the MSM” purgatory, although Stanley Garza’s website says he’s only formed an exploratory committee.

    In 2008, he ran for Tax Assessor/Collector in San Jacinto County…as a Republican. He says border control bills in the most recent legislative session caused him to switch parties. (Someone should tell him that pictures of him with Rick Perry and Michael Williams are not the ideal way to win Democratic votes.)

    A threat to split the Hispanic vote away from Ricardo Sanchez? Given that Garza raised a grand total of $140 in his first quarter of fundraising (including a $100 loan to himself), the answer would tend to point towards no…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | No Comments »

    Texas Senate Race Updates for July 20, 2011: Roundup of Reactions to Dewhurst’s Entry

    July 20th, 2011

    Lots of reaction to Lt. Governor David Dewhurst’s long-awaited announcement that he was getting in the Senate race yesterday.

    Here’s Dewhurst’s official announcement:

    Ted Cruz offers a video response:

    That video offers a URL for another Cruz website, https://www.provenconservative.com/, but it’s just a fundraising splash page with a link that leads to the main Cruz website.

    In response to the Dewhurst announcement, the Tom Leppert campaign sent me a press release (which doesn’t appear to be online) stating:

    “It comes as little surprise to me that David Dewhurst has thrown his hat into the ring. Like other career politicians, he has long expressed his interest in a host of higher offices, and I’m glad he has finally settled on the job he wants next.

    “As my Twitter followers know, I have been asking David where he stands on a number of important issues. Now that he’s a candidate he should be ready to tell us whether he will support Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget, fight the NLRB’s attacks on Right to Work, call for an end to Obama’s offshore drilling moratorium and sign the Cut Cap Balance Pledge.

    “This election is about which candidate knows how to spur job growth and restore fiscal responsibility to Washington. The career politicians and lawyers have had their chance, and they’ve failed. It’s time to send a real-life job creator to the U.S. Senate. I’ve signed both sides of a paycheck, and I’ve made the tough choices in both the private sector and as Mayor of Dallas to cut spending and balance budgets.

    “At a time when families are struggling and Washington continues down the wrong path and ignores the tough calls, Texans will choose a new Senator to represent them. They will have three clear choices – a career politician, a lawyer, or a businessman who brings a unique conservative approach to government. Someone who’s signed both sides of a paycheck, grown a business, and cut wasteful spending in both the public and private sector. Who understands firsthand how decisions made in Washington affect the economy. Only one candidate in the race for Senate has created thousands of jobs and made the hard calls that are so lacking in Washington right now.”

    More about the Leppert “lawyer” attack line against Cruz anon (I don’t think it will be successful), but it’s interesting how the Leppert campaign plays up his businessman credentials and never mentions (at least here) that he was Mayor of Dallas for four years.

    They also noted this National Journal Hotline on Call piece on Leppert.

    I can find no online reaction from Elizabeth Ames Jones to Dewhurst entering the race, but she just went from a distant third to an even-more-distant fourth.

    Ross Ramsey at The Texas Tribune noted that Dewhurst had a pretty soft opening, with a bigger event scheduled for later in the week. Ramsey also mentions Glenn Addison among those running, but not the other two GOP longshots (which, given their lack of any serious fundraising while he raised an additional $11,872 in Q2, seems fair).

    Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson says he’ll be running for Lt. Governor in 2014. Agricultural Commissioner Todd Staples is also in the race.

    Paul Burka is not impressed with Dewhurst’s announcement. Laid-off teachers, yadda yadda, but what’s interesting to me is that Burka says he received a Dewhurst robocall for his announcement. This does not strike me as the optimal strategy for disseminating information in the internet age…

    The PJ Tatler on Dewhurst’s announcement:

    Dewhurst is a billionaire and has proven that he can run and win statewide contests in Texas, which can be a challenging state to run in due to its size, its five or six (depending on how you count) major media markets and slew of mid-sized markets, and its diversity. He’ll be formidable, and may even jump to the favorite slot due to his high name recognition alone. And, he speaks Spanish fluently. I’ve seen him handle interviews with Spanish-speaking media on the fly; he’s a pro.

    The Spanish-speaking bit is interesting, but I’m not sure the billionaire part is accurate. Dewhurst is rich, certainly, but I didn’t get the impression that he was that rich.

    The Daily Kossacks still seem to regard Cruz as the real conservative in the race: “While Dewhurst has been dithering on the parapets, his chief rival for the GOP nomination, Ted Cruz, continues to cement his position as the movement conservative standard-bearer.”

    At least one blogger was underwhelmed by the Dewhurst announcement: “With all the fanfare and enthusiasm of a Baptist funeral, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst announced Tuesday that he’d like to be among the number of people Ted Cruz will pwn next March.”

    Other Senate race news:

  • The Washington Post says that Ricardo Sanchez’s fundraising efforts are off to a poor start.
  • Over at the Houston Chronicle, Patricia Kilday Hart displays her poor research skills by declaring that “Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez is the only announced candidate in the Democratic Primary U.S. Senate race.” Perhaps Sean Hubbard should take up robbing banks, since he seems to be invisible to vast swathes of the MSM.
  • Cruz interviewed by Conservatives in Action.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »

    Dewhurst is In

    July 19th, 2011

    It’s official.

    Tom Leppert says he considers Dewhurst, not Ted Cruz, his main competition. Which is what you would expect him to say.

    More details and reactions tomorrow.

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »

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