Meteor Blades tries to reason with gun nuts. I don’t think it is possible to reason with gun nuts. Instead of trying to use language and logic, I submit the following National Geographic program on the 1997 shootout in North Hollywood. It’s forty-seven minutes long and it’s kind of hokey, but it demonstrates how difficult it is to deal with a man who is wearing body armor and is armed with an automatic weapon and a 100-round drum.
Please note that these bank robbers did not have any head armor. Also note that they were facing 50 police officers who were trained to fire their weapons.
Anyone who tells you that they could have stopped the Aurora massacre is either lying or wrong. This lunatic fantasized that he was the Joker. The gun nuts think they’re Clint Eastwood. No difference.
And so somehow the people who cannot fathom the reasoning after the fact why a shootout cannot be successful argue that in the heat of a presumed attack their IQ raises significantly allowing them to save the day?
Read somewhere – was it here? Can’t remember – that this is called “OK Corral Gun Policy.” That about sums it up for me.
The reason hard core gun fetishists believe this is that for them buying and carrying a weapon is a fantasy fulfillment mechanism, and part of that fantasy is the idea that guns make them powerful, and give them control that they don’t feel in their everyday lives. When you try to explain to them that no, they aren’t Harry Potter, and that magic wand of theirs won’t save them from random Voldemorts, they can’t process it. They think they’re special little snowflakes endowed with supernatural powers. They’re too invested in the dream.
Boo:
What makes it worse is that there are gun safety instructors(see the one Dave Weigel interviewed) who should know better and apparently don’t.
That dude sounded like a straight up Republican operative to me. Greg Block or w/e, right?
It’s one thing to argue you could shoot the guy (I’d still say you’re full of shit); quite another when he’s decked out in top-notch armor from head-to-toe and in a dark, crowded room.
Or, as Atrios says:
“One significant identifier of “the bad guy” is that he’s the one with the fucking gun. They’d all just shoot each other. And everyone in the way.”
What’s interesting is that MB actually had him as a gun instructor. But you are right. He sounded like an NRA spokesbot. Moses(aka Charlton Heston) couldn’t have done any better when he was alive.
The mere fact that he said the Democrats will try to use it to ban assault weapons told the entire tale.
“Meteor Blades” has proven himself over and over again to be a lockstep, clomp clomp clomping leftiness asshole. He is…or was at least, back in 2005 or…Kos’s Wyatt Earp keeping the Daily Tombstone safe from people who didn’t toe the official line. I put the name in quotes because I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was a construct of a number of people due to the absolute impossibility of any one poster posting so many comments in a given period of time when he…it, they, whatever…was/were lambasting disbelievers just before the July 4th massacre. Maybe there is one “Meteor Blades” and he just hires helpers…deputies, so to speak…when the going gets rough, I dunno. But I do know that he/it/them is/are nothing with which I want to deal on any level. Whatever he says, I am prone to look in the other direction for the truth.
A nasty character.
Bet on it.
What? You never noticed?
AG
Is possible for you to ever discuss an issue on its merits? His post on this seems on point.
Merits? Source is “merits,” ishmael. If someone has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are some kind of centrist enforcer, everything that they say is bogus. They say things for all the wrong reasons. I no longer trust this entity and I do not care what it is that he says. If someone like George W. Butch made you some promises or made any statement at all about anything…whether you “agreed” with it or not…would you accept what he says as anything other than more Bush bullshit? I certainly wouldn’t. Ditto Meteor Blades.
Is possible for me to ever discuss an issue on its merits?
I just did.
Meteor Blades is the issue.
Further?
Sure?
You want to discuss gun control?
Great.
If I had been in that theater when that man started shooting I would have felt much better if I had a gun. Why? Because you don’t bring platitudes to a gunfight. If this nation could actually enforce its millions of laws…which it has proven totally incapable of doing…then “gun control” would not be an issue. Guns would be controlled. But they’re not, and all the theorizing in the world…including that of Meteor Blades…wll not change that fact. He says in that little article that he is “proficient lifelong target shooter.” OK. If he is telling the truth…and again, I doubt the veracity of everything he says…that means he probably knows how to handle firearms. If Meteor Blades had been in that theater and time was frozen immediately after he first recognized that there was a shooter killing people while he was given a choice of having a weapon or not, what the fuck do you think his choice would have been? “Oh…it’s dangerous to use a weapon in this instance. I think I’ll just take my unarmed chances and possibly die cowering under my theater seat?”
Please.
AG
I know Meteor Blades and have met him and hung out with him.
He’s an outstanding person. Although his eyepatch would probably only make you more suspicious.
You should choose your friends more wisely, methinks.
AG
“I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was a construct of a number of people”
hahahahahahahahahahahaha.
My apologies, MB. You are too consistently nasty to be a construct. I confused you and DHinMI in my memory of those glorious Pie Fight/July 4th Massacre times over at Lockstep Orange. Y’all were fairly interchangeable as far as I could see. Still are, apparently.
Now there’s a comment worthy of a Dkos version deep thinker.
Ahhh…the memories!!!
However…for those here who might still think that Dkos is some kind of honorable leftiness site rather than a digital version of the same sort of clomp clomp clomping no-think that destroyed the U.S. Communist Party in the late ’40/early ’50s, I will post the part of one of my diaries that proved “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that there are indeed entities on that site that are constructs. The diary itself seems to have been scrubbed and I did not save my work at that time. However, this part is still available on Booman Tribune and I really have no reason to make the shit up.
Nice to see you here, sir. Somewhere that allows me to confront you w/out fear of banning.
Got the courage to stay?
We shall see.
AG
.
Pity you picked on the wrong person, true I’ve lost all love for dkos ever since my double banning. MB signed up with BooMan at a very early date with ID #97 and has plenty of contributions. Of course the pie fight tripled/quadrupled the membership at the pond at we were very grateful for some excellent diarists, many who have moved on to contribute elsewhere or start their own blog.
BooMan’s opinion piece why he started his blog – The Lowdown on Daily Kos.
More precise link to your 2006 comment.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I didn’t “pick on the wrong person,” actually. I simply picked on the wrong wrong person. There is plenty of blame to be spread around at Dkos, and the symptoms and behavior of the culprits there are many and varied.
Other than that…yes, I know about that link. The original link however…where I first wrote about the boiler room system of disciplining thought criminals…was on Dkos. Unsurprisingly, it has been non-diaried. Much of my other work is still up there, but not that one.
Dkos business as usual.
Later…
AG
DHinMI is also a real person. I have met him, too. The less said about him the better.
Seems to me it’s more like “the less said about my timeline” the better, eh? One worker in a boileroom system can still be a real person, right?
Kinda sorta, anyway.
Nice post, Booman. Rubbing up against the truth of the matter, I think.
Right.
I agree wholeheartedly.
The less said about…and heard from…his allies the better as well.
And the less said about the slimy goings on under the Kos rock the better too. After all…they helped get our progressive hero O’Bomber elected, right? Wouldn’t want to disturb that kind of success, would we? I mean…lookit what he’s done fer the country so far, eh?
1984 came a little late this century.
Bet on it.
Wake up and smell the bullshit, Booman.
It’s about time that you did.
AG
No comment, eh? Too “fact-based” for a Dkos enforcer. Business as usual in political hustle land.
No surprise.
You’re not Clint Eastwood either. Not even close.
AG
Calling Meteor Blades “consistently nasty” is so baseless and wrong that it’s just pathetic. Why don’t you just admit that you made a mistake?
I don’t mean to wander OT here, but when was the last time anybody in this room admitted to making a mistake? I’m not even being snarky or nuthin’.
Booman, he allied himself with the nastiest characters on that blog. “Good cop, bad cop” is bullshit if the so-called “good cop” is in league with a cadre of dirty cops, and that he was.
Below is an excerpt from the diary that probably got me banned from Dkos…a strong piece on the idea of “NEWSTRIKE” as an economic weapon (The Independence Day Media Massacre. Dkos finally flexes its economic muscle!!!). It was a comment regarding his guilt by association. I stand by it. I have neither the time nor the desire to go wading through that pile of centrist filth posing as a “progressive” site to find more evidence. Guilt by association is enough as far as I am concerned.
Here it is:
Deal wid it.
AG
P.S. Why do i think that this diary was the AG killer on Dkos? Because what I was doing was actually finding a larger and quite possibly action-oriented audience. Nip the real stuff in the bud and then clomp clomp clomp on down the PermaGov
faux leftist“centrist” road has been the Dkos tactic to wealth and power from the get-go. Bet on it.P.P.S. I repeat…lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. Lie down with bots…and I have yet to see any kind of rebuttal to the concusions dwan on my timeline above…get up a machine.
So it goes.
P.P.P.S. Anyone that does have an effective rebuttal to that timeline…I’m waiting. 7 years and counting, KosKids. 7 years and counting. Not a fucking word. Geez…you”d think hey were advising Romney on his tax returns.
Come to think of it…why wouldn’t they be? He’s just another bad cop in a fix scenario. Acting coaches work with villain specialists as well as heroes, right? Mary Matalin and James Carville go home at night and share the same vampirish meals. It’s all a shell game, Booman, and you are just one of the shuffled peas. Wake the fuck up.
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
The way Daily Kos administered the site is one thing. I obviously had my own differences with them on that or this site wouldn’t exist.
But the people you mention are real. They are not robots. There was no robot script on Daily Kos. I know because their site worked the exact same way this site works.
I know DHinMi and Kagro X and McJoan and SusanG and Plutonium Page and Meteor Blades and Markos. I have met them. With the exception of DH, they’re nice people.
You shouldn’t talk unfounded trash about crap you don’t understand.
Explain the timeline. Bots, an organized lynching party, posters-for-hire…call it what you will.
it’s nasty stuff.
A site operating on that level is not to be trusted on any level. And if you somehow think that they were doing this on their own, without at least tacit approval of Moulitsas (The old Godfather con. “I didn’t know nuthin!!!), then you are more naive than I ever thought possible.
AG
why don’t you read the comments. The mystery will disappear.
Which comments, Booman? Where? Give me a link that will help me to “understand” how two individual people can average about one comment every 4 minutes or so over 8 1/2 hours.
C’mon.
AG
As usual…the silence of the tomb when it comes to “disproving” this timeline. Why? Because it cannot be disproved, short of calling me a liar. If there is anything that I have established during my many forays into leftiness land, it is that I am decidedly not a liar. The tempo and frequency of these posts cannot be explained, either. Not without admitting either massive posting fraud or accepting the possibility of divine miracles at work in the blog world. I mean…I suppose it is possible that these two supposedly “real people” were somehow mounted by the saints and forced to commit miraculous acts in support of The Holy Kos. I just don’t see it, myself.
You?
AG
You assume these people had lives outside of Daily Kos.
DHinMI obsessively commented on Daily Kos for eight hours at a time for five or six years. Go read his comments instead of glazing over his time stamps and you’ll see (probably) a particularly nasty individual being argumentative about fifty different issues for eight straight hours. That was his life.
If that’s the case then Mouitsos used DHinMI’s illness for his own ends.
Sorry, Booman…there is no excuse for what happened there. The website, its owners and controllers plus all those who cooperated in the scam of free speech/democracy at that time are all equally to blame. And they are also equally not to be trusted. Including the oh so-honored Meteor Blades, who allied himself with DHinMI for his own reasons.
What were those reasons?
Ignorance?
Moral blindness?
Agreement with the means that were used to certain ends?
No honor anywhere.
None.
My point stands.
AG
Flamewars are lucrative.
Yes, they’re lucrative. And lucre is filthy. It’s shit like that up and down the board that has gotten the U.S. in the nasty position it now occupies. Manufactured content. False content.
Fuck that shit.
Wherever it appears.
AG
Yes, but Meteor Blades did not engage in any flamewar behavior. Ever.
Above the fray, eh?
Acting preznidential holds no water for me.
He was an underboss in that criminally false system. He wasn’t s’opse to be in on the hits. Plausible deniability and all that.
You really don’t get it, do you Booman?
Dkos is a criminally false leftiness flag op.
It’s as plain as day.
What?
They got O’Bomber elected?
Like I said…
AG
More like “in the fray:
He did good and courageous work. Paid some hard dues. Yet somehow he got stuck in that orange-tinted sewer of “moderation.”
Sounds tragic, to me.
Is there more to the story?
AG
When Mexico is asking you to reconsider your gun laws you know that somethings not right.
Mexico, the ordinary citizen, does not have a gun culture [the drug cartels’ war with each other does not represent Mexican culture as a whole]. Nor, until recently, a drug culture AT ALL. part of the tragedy of drug trade being routed through Mexico.
To clarify further: the cartels have used easy access to arms in the USA to enforce their routing their drug trade TO the USA (originally from S.A) through Mexico. Mexican citizens have been interested in reducing 1) easy access to firearms in the USA 2)demand for drugs in the USA. On the Mexico side, they need a strong police force, not military, to fight the cartels. Militarizing the problem has proved disastrous to the safety of citizens and ineffective in reducing the power of cartels.
.
… and of course their slogan: “Don’t let Obama take your gun away” is repeated over and over by all red neck Republicans in comments on the tragedy in Aurora. AR-15 assault rifle, ideal for the upcoming fight against them socialists and big government.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Not sure of the subject of the call — I hung up — but I had a robocall from Wayne LaPierre at 12:30 pm EDT yesterday — roughly 12 hrs after the shooting.
Life, like comedy, is mostly timing.
Lord knows I’m not a Piers Morgan fan, but I did happen to see him take this idjit who tried to throw shade on the discussion about gun control. It was the night after the shooting, and Morgan had a panel on to discuss it and gun control and what not. Piers really did give him the whats to. Even I was like “good on you Piers Morgan, good on you”. Still can’t stand him though, but I sure wish more pols were willing to take it to obvious NRA nuts the same way.
Here’s video:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2012/07/21/pmt-david-kopel.cnn
Oh and BTW, I see POTUS will be in Colorado today. Is it me or does it just seem like this POTUS has literally become consoler-in-chief. Has any other POTUS have to give so many such counsel in his first term?
Both Dubya and Clinton had huge tragedies in their first term. Reagan had the Space Shuttle in his second.
How dare you bring facts and history into lamh’s ongoing attempts to portray Obama as the bravest, kindest, warmest, most awesomest President EVVVVVERRRR in the face of unimaginable, never before seen tragedy and hardship and disaster? THE NATION IS FALLING APART ON HIM!
There was like a tornado or something last year! And an attempted political assassination. That’s pretty much just like the time hundreds of people got blown up in Oklahoma City.
Or 9/11.
…Or 9/11. It was only eleven years ago, lamh, jesus.
wow, not what I said at all, nor what I was impying but way to attack over nothing.
Which seems a highly unusual question given that we are barely a decade out from that time a bunch of terrorists blew up the two largest buildings in the country (and the Pentagon) and killed 3000 people in a morning.
Strange thing to forget or sweep aside…
The POTUS is the Chief Priest of the Civic Religion of the US, in that he functions in this consoler role. Bush did it, often well. Each POTUS must do this, and I welcome Obama’s assumption of this role. Since Romney is out of the country, it is easy to do this non-politically.
An inevitable result of our separating the Head-of-State and the Leader-of-the-Government-of-the-Day.
One reason why there aren’t too many knock-offs of our Constitution out there…
Once again. There were no laws that would have prevented people from concealed carry in the theater (unless there was a countervailing theater policy).
Sooo… where were these great heroes that everyone is fantasizing about? Where were the 71-year-old geezers with guns in their hands, rush the mad gunman?
One of the facts of current American culture is that people don’t want to get involved in any tense situation. It’s been a recurring theme since the murder of Kitty Genovese in the 1960s. And in a perverse way that is also one of the motives of the gun nuts–solve it quick without being involved. Crazy logic…but nonetheless.
Likely, situations that make this big a splash in the news are not preventable. They make a big splash in the news because they are so uncommon. From Steven D’s map yesterday, in Colarado you have a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying from the use of a gun. That includes accidental deaths and domestic disputes and barroom brawls and other impulse shootings. Aurora’s murder rate is 0.07 per 1000. For all murders. That is why a mass murder is such huge news. Even in a nation of 330 million, it doesn’t happen that much. It is an outlier. Except in some demographics, gun deaths don’t happen that much.
And preventative measures on events that don’t happen that much either involve draconian controls or they are irrelevant when the event does happen. Case in point TSA screening of all airline passengers to prevent terrorism. Huge security theater. Did not catch the “Underwear bomber”.
That said there are some gun controls that passed in law and enforced after the fact do work. (1) Registration can trace stolen weapons. (2) Trigger locks prevent accidental and impulse shootings. (3) Gun safes prevent accidental deaths from kids playing with firearms.
There is however not evidence that upping the charges for using a firearm in a crime deters the use of a firearm or necessarily lengthens the sentence.
Nor is there evidence that psychological profiling reduces crime (without the draconian profiling of everyone). But changes in the economy and the community life — and community policing — can and do reduce crime rates including gun crimes. We as a society just lack the political will to do what is necessary and keep trying to do the effective stuff on the cheap.
But the libertarians are moving us toward a “war of all against all” in a corporate-dominated economy driven by cutthroat competition and ready availability of “equalizers”.
Have you ever had first-aid training? The issue in first-aid training is to get people to do SOMETHING.
Some weeks ago, I was at a dinner. An aged person was sitting down, and dropped his tray all over the floor and himself. Although everyone was quite concerned, no one did anything except me. I got a napkin, and wiped off his jacket. I patted him on the back, and got the wait staff. I did not heroic or particularly good. I merely did the needed things. I was well-trained in Boy Scouts to take action.
In most cases, the shock and surprise of the moment totally confuse you. Should you attack? Unless there is a mass attack, you will get killed. Should you move? Movement often attacts attention, and you will get shot. Thus, people sit there like rabbits, doing nothing. This is not unreasonable. In fact, it is the best thing to do. But it makes them look ineffectual and useless.
I read just today from a trusted source that there have been 32 shooting massacres in the US in the last 30 years. While I haven’t tracked down the source independently yet, if true, that is not nearly rare enough for my tastes.
There was a shooting at a rural K-12 school not 20 minutes away from my house shortly after I graduated from HS sometime in the early 90s. One of my college roommates graduated from Columbine only 2-3 years before the famous shooting there (I’m a fair few years older than him, in case you’re trying to do the math). Rather famously, one woman who was killed in Aurora narrowly escaped the same fate 6 months previously in Toronto.
These events aren’t nearly uncommon enough.
Secondly, the idea that these situations aren’t preventable may be true in the current political climate in the US, but that’s not saying much when we can’t even meet our debt obligations without first passing through a ridiculous and embarrassing political spectacle on the world stage.
I live in a country where the legal system makes it basically impossible for a typical citizen to obtain guns. If I flipped my lid tomorrow and decided I was ready to end it all, and had all the money I needed to buy Aurora-level hardware, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t even know where to look.
But I’m a foreigner here, so big deal, right? But I’ve asked around the locals here, and they all say the same thing: even if they had months to plan and adequate funding, they wouldn’t have the first clue where to acquire even one gun.
In the US? As long as you’ve got a good enough line of credit, you can be blasting away in no time.
I realize that the US is a different culture with different realities regarding guns. The genie’s out of the bottle. I get that. But if we had the political will, we could at least put some restrictions on how guns are sold. It doesn’t have to be as simple as a trip to Wal-Mart for a would-be mass murderer to put himself in business.
Early accounts indicate that the Aurora shooter (he who need not be named) showed a marked change in mood and demeanor just a couple of weeks before the event. How differently might things have turned out if he’d been forced to wait another month or two before he acquired the weapons (and other equipment like armor and gas) before his attack? Might he have gotten cold feet? Changed his mind? Come to his senses just long enough to seek help?
Background checks could be put in place not just for criminal records, but for dishonorable discharges, mental problems, restraining orders, or whatever you want. If someone decides to buy more than a certain number of a certain designations of firearms within a certain period of time, not only should that be blocked legally, any such attempt ought to draw some official attention.
Government buyback programs with no questions asked for certain types of firearms are shown to be effective. We could do a massive program like that tomorrow, if we could just get the laws passed.
If these strike you as wrongheaded or draconian measures, well hey, I’m just riffing. Surely there are more and better ideas out there that could be easily implemented.
Maybe I’m misreading your argument, but you seem to be saying that effective restrictive legal measures are logistically impossible to implement in the US; our hands are tied, and that’s that.
Politically that may be the case–but only maybe: A Frank Luntz conducted poll of NRA members for Mayors Against Illegal Handguns shows that there is a widespread acceptance of the need for more sensible controls for keeping guns out of the wrong hands, it’s just that people aren’t aware of the details of the various policy debates. Apparently a great number of NRA members have little or no understanding of how that organization operates, nor yet the policies they promote.
Like everything else, the majority tends to be on the side of progressive reform. We just keep losing the message battle. That could be fixed. It might not even have to be all that difficult, for all we know.
The mass murders in Norway and Canada are the key evidence in my argument that these incidents (which are the classic “lone wolf” situation that US counter-terrorism folks keep yammering about) are not totally preventable. Thirty mass murders in 32 years is around an average of one a year — even though you know copycatting means they come in clusters. So you chances of being involved in a mass murder in the US are 1 in 330 million. For one in five years in France, your chances would be about the same 0.2 in 65 million. You have to take that into account when comparing countries.
One legal change that would help would be a common minimum legal environment globally and an international effort to control smuggling (which would work against everyone’s clandestine operations). Suppose there were a global registration system in which manufacturers identified serial numbers and the original ship-to party. Weapons sales could be tracked. You would know that a “novelty company” in New Jersey purchased x number of Italian-made inexpensive firearms, which later turned up in crimes in NYC.
In the US, the biggest issue is that state laws are all over the lot, and there is a huge loophole for gun shows. And the fact that there has been so much discussion about controls has made owning guns culturally “cool” and owning near-miltary-grade weapons and explosives “extreme” (in the sense of extreme motocross, extreme skateboarding, etc.)
It’s the genie out of the bottle problem that would require draconian measures. Buy-backs help but a lot of folks and even their heirs treasure weapons as heirlooms. Especially guns with cachet, like Berettas, Lugers, and Glocks. So those likely would never show up for buy-back. Another issue with buy-back programs is when they stimulate gun sales or thefts just to obtain cash from the program. The design of the program is key to preventing that.
Our hands are tied politically right now for sure. But logistically there are things that could be done without undue invasions of privacy. Some states used to do them but don’t anymore because of the gun lobby.
IMO, the most important thing we can do is to start deglamorizing gun culture and start paying attention when folks start taking movies, video games, novels or some other story line just a little too seriously. Social and cultural change will translate into political change.
And ramping down the political rhetoric about gun control will begin to undercut the scaremongering “they’re gonna take your guns away” talk that began after the Waco Wacko fought off the FBI and after Ruby Ridge. Janet Reno and Bill Clinton took the rap, but this was another case of FBI over-reaction.
If the rhetoric gets ramped down, people will find it easier to look at the practical issues and the effects on privacy.
It’s a subjective measure to say, first of all, what “rare” and “common” mean from our individual perspectives. Statistical rarity is one thing, but even the way you present the evidence is subject to some caveats:
That, to me, is not “rare.” We may not all be getting shot at, but these events affect all of us as they become an annual fact of life.
As to these events not being totally preventable, I can’t argue with that, nor was I trying to. But there’s a world of daylight between them being “totally preventable” and us doing a better job of preventing them. We can and should be doing more. That’s my essential point. We can debate various strategies for doing so, but it’s fairly obvious to me that there must be all kinds of effective measures we could be taking but aren’t.
Global tracking and smuggling are beyond the scope of what I was trying to argue, but certainly also important areas to pursue. Basically I’m interested in availability, making it more difficult to buy weapons and ammo that are designed to efficiently kill large numbers of people, in large quantities, and with almost no waiting period.
My dad’s been a gun collector since I can remember. He probably has hundreds. Mostly they’re black powder rifles, but there’s a little bit of everything in there. I’m not worried about a collector blowing his stack someday and going on a rampage. I’m worried about a troubled person under pressure quietly turning a mental corner into a state of mind in which it becomes possible to carry out such an attack, and then having little or no difficulty in quickly equipping himself with the means to do so.
Anyway, those are the basic points.
I have been getting into multiple futile arguments with gun supporters that somehow the answer to these massacres is arming more people. It is kind like the tax cuts always work in all situations logic that dominates the right.
I have kept my arguments focused on lessening these death tolls by limiting access to automatic weapons and ammo. I really should argue to ban all guns because it would be the same to these people. Some even argue that gun laws are too strict. I agree that it is pointless.
Here is a well written lengthy feature on the Norway shootings and it worth your time.
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201208/anders-behring-breivik-norway-massacre-story?mbid=
social_twitter_gqmagazine