Bombings in Oslo, Norway; shootings

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I'm having a hard time processing the logistics of the island shooting. according to the news the guy had a rifle with him and lots of ammunition.

I know nothing of weapons, but doesn't it take a while to reload a rifle? how does a guy shoot over 80 people with a rifle and nobody stops him? the police must've been notified quite early I suppose, after all these were teenagers so they must've all had mobile phones. I imagine they had adult minders who were trained in handling life-threathening situations, they must have known alarm procedures at least.

I just don't get it, how could he have kept shooting person after person with the rifle, with such efficiency, it must have lasted for hours.

84 children confirmed dead on the island now.

Focus people.

That's 84 children shot deliberately by a maniac. They had no defences, and their only way off the island was to swim to safety whilst being shot at like fish in a barrel.

RIP

What about the attack with explosive on the government center where the prime minister of Norway works?

ruveyn

This reminds me of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, he was gunned down by a right wing jewish man (Yigal Amir). At the time everone had been expecting an arab gunman from an organisation such as Hamas to try to kill Rabin. The problem that all the "experts" seemed to be looking in the wrong direction.

While aspies may not be perfect, I think an aspie could be likely to be better than most people in understanding that it is impossible to predict from what direction the threat will come from. I used as a PhD student to read a journal devoted to policing, it was aimed at police officers. Each issue had advice on a different issue such as how to search a person or car safely.

One issue considered the problem of an officer being attacked by a person they have to go and arrest, the journal article warned that there is no such thing as a "safe arrest" and that while a policeman should never be brutal and thug like, he should never given in to stereotypes about what sort of a person might turn nasty. The harmless looking old lady who you are arresting for shoplifting might be very distressed at the idea of losing her freedom so she might attack the policeman in an attempt to escape.

In the same way in terms of terrorism we must not stereotype and become blind to the threat which comes from an unexpected direction. Some people on this forum have been too quick to adopt the idea that the source of the problem comes from a given direction.

On the way to the cake shop while getting a cake for my wife, I came to the conculsion that the gun thug on the island is a chicken and nasty coward. He is not a real man, real men do not shoot children in cold blood. I think he is a lower life form which needs to be locked up for the protection of society.

The problem with Norway and Sweden is that the population density is low, so it might take an hour for a policeman to arm himself with a rifle and drive like a rally driver to the lake.

I thought about what this vile creep has done, I have some experience with guns. I think that the sicko must have made a lot of effort to get ready to do his crime. I suspect that he had plenty of large magazines ready loaded. I know that the ban on the sale of magazines which hold more than 10 was very unpopular in the USA. But maybe restricting self loading rifles, and limiting people's access to large pistol magazines might have lowered the death toll.

I might get some flak from the aspie gun lobby but I do not see a decent case for hunters or target shooters using anything other than a bolt action or a lever action rifle or carbine. While for home defence I do not think that SMGs like the 9 mm uzi is reasonable.

With self loading large bore rifles, I am not sure what reasons a person could have for having one rather than a traditional bolt action. For target shooting a bolt action is best as you have a longer barrel than you get in something self loading like a M16. Another problem which I see with self loaders is that the mechanism is complex (more likely to jam) when compared with a bolt action.

For responsible big game hunting then I do not see the need for a AK-47 or someother self loader. If you are doing large game shooting then if you use a bolt action with a magazine of 5 rounds then if you miss the tiger then you can cycle the bolt by hand to allow you to fire a second shot at the big cat which now wants to eat you. But I do not think many hunters are going to try to hunt anything nearly as dangerous as a tiger.

I think that if you are an american in texas who has an armed intruder in your house then opening up with a submachine gun like an uzi is going to do more harm than good in most cases as the number of strays will be so large. I think that something like a 9 mm pistol with a moderate sized clip, a lever action 44 winchester carbine or a pump action shotgun would be able to deal with most thugs. I think people who claim that they need uzis, AK-47s, self loading shotguns with large magazines are as wrong as a man who claims he needs a flame thrower to light the BBQ.

It looks like a rare event in Norway. A home grown terrorist who is not a Muslim. That is every unusual.

ruveyn

and yet, it's not really *that* surprising.

there are many neo-nazi groups in Scandinavia, some of them quite loud (re: the guys who stole the Auschwitz' "Arbeit macht Frei" sign). I'm pretty sure I'd read at lest two Henning Mankell books where he makes scandinavian neo-nazis the culprits, and he's not the only Swedish writer who's used this theme in his books. Stieg Larsson (the Millenium Trilogy guy) wrote a non-fiction book based on his own research into extreme right-wing groups in Sweden.

these guys have been a threat for quite some time in Scandinavia, or at least in its pop-culture. sooner or later one of them would've snapped. it's statistically inevitable, given how many of them are active in Scandinavia.

He was dressed as a policeman. When they heard the shots they didn't really know what's going on. He told people to come closer so that he would protect them. Afterwards, he started shooting them. He had a machinegun, a rifle and I think some other weapon as well. People played dead, yet he shot them in the head again to make sure they really were dead. People tried to swim away from the island and he started shooting after them. Some did hide, but there was 600 people on that small island. People were afraid to use cellphones because they were scared he would find them. It lasted less than an hour.

I was unaware there was a neo-nazi problem in that neck of the woods.

ruveyn

It's really horrible, and hard to think that many of the victims of the shootings were my age.

You would prefer that the victims had been older?

ruveyn

Um, no?
I would prefer that it didn't happen at all...

Didn't a Norwegian nazi group steal the Arbeit Macht Frei sign from Auschwitz?

There is a growing problem with neo-nazi's here in Sweden, with them getting seats in government. They even organise camps for the kids of a similar nature to the one in Norway.

http://www.thelocal.se/34340/20110614/

The latest reports suggest that the death toll will rise to ninety dead, at the island, if none of the many, critically injured, do not die.

...Out of 560 present. Almost every sixth was shot dead.

A friend of him from his past, in school, couldn't understand it at all, and told on Norwegian television that the killer, back then, was a person who even was quick to stand up for people that were being bullied, in school. He felt that it seemed as if he had just ended up on a completely different path, from last he heard from him.


The only bright side in this is that he wasn't the kind of terrorist that so many assumed. Had he been, it would've been very bad for everyone in Scandinavia.

Last edited by Beauty_pact on 23 Jul 2011, 7:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.

You always seek confrontation, don't you?

You know, I, personally, *would* have preferred that they were older. Much older, anyway.