I suppose when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. And before the ever-increasing death toll from the horror unfolding in Oslo and on Utoya had worked its way up out of single digits, the usual suspects (warning: Malkin and Geller links) wasted no time in politicizing the massacre, and pulled out their trusty "jihadi terrorist" hammer. Even by evening, as evidence continued to mount that this was an act of domestic right-wing terrorism, Laura Ingraham, guest hosting The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, was glibly describing the attack as "the work, once again, of Muslim extremists." (h/t to Cullen Milligan's diary)
But as facts about Anders Behring Breivik, the man Norwegian police had taken into custody on Utoya, began to emerge, did the glaring falseness of their initial assumptions, coupled with Breivik's anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-multicultural views, inspire even the slightest moment of sober reflection at the rightward end of the blogosphere at indications that Breivik might be, at least in some key ways, one of their own?
Not exactly.
Instead, some began to pick up another favorite hammer, one well-worn at times of incomprehensible gun violence: their unshakable assumption that the world would be a much safer place if everybody, everywhere, was packing heat.
Musings on such whackery follow below the fold.
Now, it's only fair to point out that this reflexive, gun-totin' reaction wasn't even the craziest reaction in the right blogosphere. No, as is frequently the case, it's the the brain trust at Free Republic who take that particular medal, where reaction to Breivik's apparent political and religious leanings ranged from dizzying cognitive-dissonance denialism:
This was no christian conservative. Unless he was muslim sleeper and wanted to smear christian conservatives.
To thinly-veiled approval:
I am sure that what Breivik aimed to do was to strike fear to the Norwegian left-wing elite who send their children to these camps.
And:
He really wanted to kill people from the labour party which is the ruling government party as well. And attacking the youths makes sense
So with the Freepers ably nailing down that particular fringe, taking up the next trusty hammer without missing a beat fell to Powerline:
Many facts are still unknown, but at this point it appears that a key ingredient in the tragedy was the fact that the killer had the only gun on the island. It is, really, one of the ultimate horror scenarios: hundreds of kids, accompanied by a relative handful of adults, isolated on an island with a crazed killer. The outcome might have been very different if some of those adults had been armed.
Would the same thing happen here, if, for example, there was a group of a thousand or so Boy Scouts assembled with their leaders? I am not sure. Thinking back on my native South Dakota, it is hard to imagine a mass murder being carried out over an extended period of time because there is no one nearby with a firearm. In any event, if the adults who are responsible for the safety of similar groups of kids here in the U.S. haven’t been arming themselves, especially in isolated conditions, they should consider doing so.
And, doubling down on Powerline's riff, Hot Air:
No one else on the island was armed, apparently, a point underscored by my friends at Power Line. Incidents like this are exceedingly rare, which is why they get so much attention, so people should be wary of drawing any particular lesson from a single data point. In general, though, when malefactors determined to commit violence do appear (whatever the context), a thoroughly disarmed victim set only helps them succeed.
I don't intend this as a diary on RKBA, and I'm not tagging it as such, but I suppose there'd be little I could do to prevent an RKBA pie fight from breaking out in the comments, should such occur. Nevertheless, in the spirit of full disclosure, I'll describe myself as cautiously pro-Second-Amendment, a position at which I grudgingly arrived with the rise of the "patriot" militia movement during the Clinton administration, and the realization that those yahoos would be armed regardless of laws against it, with law-abiding lefties in Red States like me pretty much unprotected should they get the race-and-ideology-driven civil war they were so clearly itching for.
But for all that I'm an advocate of responsible gun ownership, I just can't bring myself to see converting summer youth camps into armed camps as a useful or effective reaction to horrors like yesterday's attack.
Maybe my reaction is influenced by sepia-toned, nostalgic memories of my own childhood church camp experiences in quiet, back-woods 1970s Minnesota, but while I've broken away from the evangelical and fundamentalist theology of the churches sponsoring the camp and have never really shared that theology's implicit political ideology, I still very much remember that camp as a rather peaceable and nurturing place on the whole. It's where I learned how to swim, how to play box hockey, how to speak Ubbi Dubbi, for crying out loud. The idea of firearms just doesn't even enter into it, except perhaps in our fertile childhood imaginations, as we played "army" amongst the trees and cabins during our free time.
Might an armed guard or two on Utoya have served to partially blunt Breivik's savagery? Maybe, but I remain unconvinced. And further, what sort of fearful message would we be sending to the children and their parents--the idea that even at such a peaceful gathering, nobody would be truly safe if the place wasn't armed? Is the world really so much more of a dangerous place now that the sleepy lakes and islands where our youth gather for summer fun need armed protection? Because I can't help but think that for all that the staff at our camp were probably a fairly conservative bunch, it would never have occurred to them that things would be better with the presence of firearms, and I very much doubt that any of them ever brought them.
And I can't help but see it as abidingly cynical, at the very least, to exploit the raw grief of the Norwegian people by seizing upon it to justify a favorite gun-rights political talking point.