I think you mentioned this guys motive. He wasn’t randomly killing summer camp kids. He was killing the future leaders of that specific political party and perhaps business leaders. The brightest and best of the youth.
A lot of thought and planning went into this. The bombing was partially a diversion to occupy the police. He wasn’t your typical nut case.
I just looked at the table of contents of the “manifesto” Breivik supposedly linked to on his Twitter account. It’s like an encyclopedia of crazy conspiracy theories and right-wing nuttery.
I too am wondering why a gathering of 700 teen and twenty-something activist future leaders, in a country with a national service requirement, under attack for over an hour-and-a-half by a single gunman with weapons that would have needed re-loading, didn’t produce at least a squad-size group of berserkers who would have tried to take this guy out.
This peace and reason stuff is relatively new territory for the Norwegians. From the Dark Ages through the Second World War, they were among Europe’s most fearsome warriors (and usually near the top of the list). The country’s most famous humanitarian is (polar explorer and scientist) Fritjof Nansen, who was hardly a shy violet.
I have a feeling that many of the survivors are going to be asking themselves about these things. 
ETA: On reread, I’m sorry if this comes accross as self-centred. I’m going to leave it as it is, but I don’t mean to hijack the discussion.
This is incomprehensible.
A human being cannot act this way. This man is less something fucking fundamental. Something so base you wouldn’t notice it wasn’t there, even if you took a good look, because its’ absence is inconceivable. I’ve met my share of alcoholics, junkies, violent criminals, muggers, plain bastards and crazy people.
But this guy’s got something broke inside.
I got to work at 3PM on friday and I’ve only been home for sleep. The hotel I work in is only half a mile away (corner of Rosenkrantz & Stortingsgata) but fortunately there’s a lot of buildings between us and the blast site. Even still, I got to watch the windows in our reception billow like sails in a gale as the pressure wave hit the hotel. One of these days, I’ll get a bottle of wine for the director for springing the money for bullet-proof glass.
An afternoon spent manning the phones, trying to get some sort of handle on the situation, some sort of assurance that this was an isolated incident. Things slowly ramping up as the T-word gets passed around the streets. At least five dead, dozens wounded. Shrapnel and glass everywhere. And then messages start ticking in from Utøya. Some madman’s capitalized on the chaos and opened fire on a youth camp. I took it in with half a ear - a fucking car bomb just went off half a mile away, in Oslo - until I start hearing it again. And again. One dead. Two dead. Five confirmed dead, many wounded. And the skies gets dark, I start seeing armed police rushing around in the streets and setting up barriers around Parliament and the Palace. Seven dead, numbers expected to rise. Cancelations flooding in, police cordoning of the downtown, people arguing with me when I can’t give any meaningful reassurance of safety. Ten dead. Night shift arrives. I go home, I switch on the news, ten people confirmed dead on the island and seven in the downtown area. I lie awake listening to the radio until the sky starts brightening and I’ve only got a few hours until it’s time to get back up and get in there. I doze off to twelve confirmed dead.
I wake up to over 80.
It’s gone past the point where you use letters to represent what’s happening - it’s moved over to numbers. And now it’s one guy at both scenes, a citizen, quiet guy, the kind you pass on the street hundreds of times a day. No grand conspiracy, no malevolent organization, just one person dedicated to exploring the limits of how fucked up in the head you can get.
And now it’s 85 on the island, 7 in the downtown, a number of critically wounded in the hospital and four youths still missing. Number of dead expected to reach 100. I’m not sure if I even want to post this, knowing I can’t take it down if I regret it, but for fuck’s sake. I just want to thank Idle Thoughts for forwarding the e-mail I sent to the mod loop. (I can read the boards from work, but its’ harder to post.)
I hope everyone’s taking care out there. I’m happy to see all the Norwegian dopers I’m aware of has checked in. Walking in Oslo’s been like a fucking ghost town the last day, it’s good to see people are up and talking about it.
They should not ask any such thing - what kind of crazy blame the victim thing is this?
These were children - innocent children. Life is not a video game or a Rambo movie.
It could have something to do with the shooter being dressed as a police officer and representing himself as such. It could also have something to do with the fact that these were kids who were running in panic, exacerbated by the fact that they knew they were on an island and had no true place to which to escape.
16 and 17 year old men fight in rebel armies all over the world. A lot of the Libyan rebels are in that age group.
With all respect, men this age aren’t helpless kids.
And they had scattered, hadn’t they? It’s not like they were all huddled up together where they could talk and plan. It was just run run run, hide hide hide, on a dinky little island. They’re Norwegian teenagers, not trained soldiers or even adults.
I think you should read your post again and think about the rather significant differences between rebel soldiers and first-world teenagers.
Everyone thinks they would respond to a situation like this with cool aplomb and practical means of dealing with a violent situation. And while there may be very rare exceptions of undercover superheros… there is a reason why soldiers and police officers get training, so that they don’t react the way that regular people do when threatened with death.
dangermom, yes… I understand the kids scattered and were probably afraid of making any noise for fear of attracting attention. One of the survivors played dead.
And on top of that, the gunman was reported to be shooting those who were on the ground…playing dead didn’t work for a lot of those kids.
Teen-aged soldiers are armed. The people on the island weren’t.
We who were not there will not know what, exactly, happened until the authorities have completed their investigation. Publishing one’s conjectures, suppositions, and assumptions prior to the conclusion of the investigation often adds only confusion to the situation.
The survivors of this horrific tragedy will have enough to deal with as they give their statements over and over. Their survivor’s guilt and PTSD will be bad enough without others piling on “you should have” and “why didn’t you?” before knowing all the facts. I realize that we want to know what happened and why it happened, so that we can avoid this sort of thing happening again, but I would ask that we show some restraint while the situation is still unfolding. What Norwegians need now are expressions of sympathy and solidarity. There will be an appropriate time for probing questions later.
To the people of Norway, you have my deepest condolences. Words fail me as I try to express how sick to my soul I am about this tragedy. I wish you healing and I hope that knowing that others share your grief can, in some small way, be of comfort to you.
No need to apologize, Gukumatz. It didn’t come off that way to me at all - it provided insight into the events in a way that watching CNN in America just can’t do.
I can’t imagine being that close physically to something this terrible.
These next days..weeks..who knows how long..will be hard, but life..society..will go on and recover.
Thanks for sharing.
-D/a
Finally heard back about my ex. She wasn’t in Oslo but was planning to research there in a couple weeks. She’s pretty shaken by events, as she has a lot of friends in Oslo.
And they are armed, organized and prepared to fight.
Whenever some lunatic shows up someplace and starts shooting, you seldom if ever see this “everybody rush him” tactic actually happen. That’s not how a bunch of unprepared, untrained, surprised strangers behave.
Like Flight 93.
Which demonstrates my point. Those passengers had time to think, time to form a common front, time to realize that they had to try something like a frontal assault. Unlike the other flights where the hijackers succeeded (and with weapons a lot less suited to holding off a mass rush than guns).
My first thought too was why didn’t they try to overpower him. But then my second thought was yeah, easier said than done. I’ve personally been held at gunpoint on at least three different occasions, and I never felt like rushing the gunman, and I was not some teenager whose weekend outing suddenly turned surreal. I think there may be a lot of guilt by some of the survivors that they didn’t rush him, but really, there’s not much they could have been expected to do.
Thanks for giving us your first-hand, eye-witness view, Gukumatz.
With due respect, asking “why didn’t anyone on the island…” is really crass at this point. The basic answer for now is “because they didn’t.”
It would have been awesome if a few teenaged heroes had taken down the gunman, and I have no doubt that many were capable of it in terms of strength and courage, but we just don’t know what it was like on the ground. It is equally possible that it was not feasible given the bystanders (many younger) and other factors.
Unless there was a vantage point that allowed for attack it was futile to charge this guy. Once started he created a zone of death around him. The kids were in a no-win situation. Now if it was in a 2 story mall where someone could drop down on him unsuspected while he reloads, maaaaaybe. But without some kind of concealed location from which to attack, the gunman held all the cards.
The priority in this situation is to establish whether this guy was part of a larger threat.