In large countries, single events are not usually taken as defining that country. So if the police in America botch a response to a mass murderer, soon enough another mass murderer will come along. There is almost always a do-over, usually many of them. If need be, we Americans can start a new war to create a do-over.
Norway doesn’t work this way. The country won’t soon have an event which generates comparable international or national publicity to the recent murders. That makes those murders, and the lack of an effective police response, sting all the more. There is no do-over on the horizon.
It turns out for instance that the helicopter crew of the Oslo police force was on vacation. In expected value terms, maybe that wasn’t a mistake but it sure didn’t turn out well. Here is an article on Norway not very much arming its police force.
The Norwegian resistance movement from WWII has a heroic reputation, but now there’s been a do-over of Norwegian response capability, so to speak, or at least a perceived do-over.
Americans have a hard time understanding the concept of not getting many do-overs.
When it comes to our debt-ceiling crisis, we are acting as if we will get a do-over for sure; I wonder if that’s justified.
Try to imagine how the Norwegian government, media and elites would be reacting if the attacks had in fact been made by some Norwegian Islamic group: they would be blaming themselves (“what bad things did we do … ?), just the opposite of what we see now.
Not really. Conservatism is spreading like a wildfire in Europe – right-wing culture warriors are trying to expand the war on Muslims, and anti-immigrant groups have been winning ground in each election.
But then, that is what they did wrong in the first place – and an extremist from either end of that war will only prove that point.
Actually, the token response would be to blame Amerikkka (with unfalsifiable claims, tying it, ever tenuously to US foreign policy/media) in any form since virgin Europe never sees such acts of horror.
It’s never “their” fault or even their own psychos’ fault. “Things like this only happen in America!” says a victim of the recent incident.
So… a guy deliberately assaults liberal targets because of his twisted, right-wing ideology, and you’re whining about how the Norwegians would totally have blamed us, if only the psycho had been muslim?
What if situation, replying to the post by Paul. It worked in Spain after AQ attack on their soil, and that was their reasonable excuse to get out as a “coalition partner” from stupid middle east adventures.
The degree of national and international publicity depends on how hard NATO seeks to beat the war drum.
It’s interesting how the American view tend to be so different from ours in Norway. Generally, our response to this has focused on (1) rejecting the values espoused by Breivik and (2) preventing similar events from occuring again (as opposed to improving our response capacity if we should fail to prevent it from happening again).
I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect Norway to be able to move a SWAT team there in much less than 40 minutes, although I guess there will be increased security at future political meetings.Vulnerabillity is the price of living in a free and open society and I think we as a society are willing to live with that.
“I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect Norway to be able to move a SWAT team there in much less than 40 minutes, ”
I can draw in about 2 seconds if I’m allowed to carry or choose to do it anyway.
Yep – the American answer to the idea of a child murderer is to put oneself in the fantasy role of a heroic gunman defending good against despicable evil doers.
Just like the man that shot down those children, actually.
The problems caused by gunning down children are not solved by handing out more guns.
Not that Americans seem able to accept this perspective, in general. Nor the Norwegian one, which involves large numbers of the country’s citizen demonstrating in public that a man with a gun is not able to change society through murder.
No, the law abiding gun owner protecting his life and the lives of others is NOT “just like” the murderous gunman, actually. The self protector didn’t strap on his shoulder holster and leave the house thinking, “it will be nice to kill something today.”
The problems of gunning down children are not solved by gun control. They are not solved by SWAT teams. That much is very clear.
No prior_approval, the American way is to jettison false beliefs and deal with the reality of what works and not show yourself out as not knowing anything on the subject by opening your mouth when you need to open your eyes and ears.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shooter
Arizona has very lax gun laws along with easy to get CCW permits. That did not prevent a gunman shooting Giffords in the head, along with others. The person who stopped the shooting did so by tackling and taking the gun away. The person who did this was almost shot by somebody who came to the scene with a gun. If police were on the scene, they’d likely shoot at anybody who’s brandishing a weapon.
Untrained yahoos with guns are not going to stop shooters. It doesn’t take you 2 seconds to draw, level and fire, but more on the order of 20 seconds. You also need quite a bit of training to be able to do this while under fire, more than likely you’d freeze or draw and fire wildly into others.
If this was the only viewpoint Americans were seeing in Norway and Europe, yeah, we wouldn’t be that concerned. But it’s not, and Breivik’s views, or some approximation of them, aren’t that rare.
Low native birthrates, high Muslim immigration and birthrates, and the conflicts and reactionaries that creates seem a little scary, looking from the outside in. There are a bunch of different ways this could play out, and they don’t all end in one big happy multicultural family living together in harmony. I’m not advocating that conflict, I’m just worried about it.
On the other topic, the police response was shameful. It reflected a nation unwilling to honestly look in the mirror.
Funny, Aslak, but practically everything I read and hear in America is precisely similar to what you describe as the Norwegian response.
There are some who correctly point out that relying on heavily armed and constantly vigilant police forces isn’t as effective as an armed citizenry, but that’s an opinion, not a response.
The US has responded to mass murders here with no less poise and resolve. Discussions about the motives of mass murderers has not resulted in numerous copycats.
What we have now is an enhanced information system which reports incidents nationally that had not been widely reported on in the past. It’s a statistical aberration.
Btw, “handing out guns” would be asinine. Why do people think in such terms?
I’d think that the reaction to 9/11 belies that claim of equal poise and resolve. I could be proven wrong, of course, if Norway vastly increases its domestic surveillance abilities and invades a country or two.
School shootings in particular are much rarer now than they were decades ago, while news reports of school shootings are much more common now.
How will you do that?
Political censorship? Profiling of “potential right-wing terrorists”? More left-wing propaganda at an earlier age, perhaps?
The fact is, your response isn’t going to be “free and open”… it is going to be fairly oppressive and extreme, but a form of extremism and oppression that reflects your specific nannie-state culture.
Uhm, no. People are discussing things like monitoring large-scale purchases of fertilizer and revising our gun control regime. Maybe that’s extremist and oppressive to you, I dunno.
So how are you going to monitor large-scale purchases of fertilizer? You know that farmers purchase large amounts of fertilizer, right? Are you going to deny fertilizer to farmers with certain political beliefs? Are you going to have to interrogate all farmers to make sure they aren’t terrorists? That certainly sounds pretty extreme!
How do you revise your gun control regime? Do you ban guns? That seems pretty extreme! Do you require that someone has the “correct” political beliefs in order to own guns? That seems pretty oppressive!
That is, of course, ignoring the utter stupidity of believing that someone cant just purchase a gun from the black market… and ignoring the fact that so many victims died because they where utterly defenseless. So it is security theater, Norway style!
Indeed, I hope that Norway does not “learn from the experience”. Some incidents are so rare as to have nothing worth-while to teach – the wide-spread costs of even attempting to address these rarities vastly outweighs the short term tragedy in the long-term.
Agreed. And if the response is more SWAT teams, or to more heavily arm the police, that would be sad.
In the US, you average policeman is on his way to being armed and equipped like a Army patrolman in Iraq. Seriously. One day very soon our policemen in the US will be in full body armor, armed with automatic weapons, and driving around in Hummvees. All this for very marginal increases in policing ability, and at huge cost (monetarily and civilly).
If Norway can avoid the militarization of its police, they will be better off.
Well said. If they overreact like the US does, they will end up with a similar police state.
If the response is improving the police force through training and proper techniques for this narrow and specific type of situation, and if that is the correct response why would that be sad? Is it sad because people are more interested in political mood affiliation than actually addressing the problem effectively? It would in fact be sad in the way most governments would do it because militarizing the police is not the solution. It’s not a matter of over or under-reacting. It is a matter of which kind of signaling the different cultures choose to employ while doing the wrong things.
The solution is police that act more like armed citizens and armed citizens that do something (act very much not like police have been acting- roping off gun free kill zones and allowing ample time for massacres for example). I knew someone would chime in with the nay-saying with strawmen about American cowboys or similar nonsense. But here is what we know. I am highly unlikely to ever stop a shooting. They are absolutely certain to never stop a shooting.
Unless more similar killings copycat or otherwise provide the do-over.
What Aslak said.
Paul, I don’t think you are right. I think the empathic reaction would have been the same. Because, in the end there is no difference between fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist right-wing or any other kind of fundamentalism. It all boils down to ethnocentric immaturity.
”Our punishment shall be more generosity, more tolerance, and more democracy.” ~ Oslo mayor Fabian Stang
Except Norway is not tolerant of views even half as ‘extreme’ right as Breivik’s. People like Breivik in the US would be able to vent their rage in Tea Party-esque gatherings, or through political protests a la Fred Phelps. But in Norway they are forced into back rooms and dark alleys which only foments their rage.
This is why, in most cases, attacks on political targets in the US are by the legitimately crazy (Loughner/Hinckley.) But this is not the case in Europe. (Breivik, at present, elicits no evidence of insanity.) Let the Fred Phelps’ of the world have their street corner to prattle on about and they don’t become suicide bombers. Restrict that and well this is what you get.
“forced into dark alleys?” ~ well not really. Anti-immigrant viewpoints are vented in many fora, public and private. Yes, it is taboo on the left, which is a problem the left should deal with. I hope for more creativity and action on this field in the wake of this tragedy.
Late to this discussion, but it’s incredibly disgraceful that you justify the terrorist attacks in Norway, on the basis of mythical restrictions to political freedom (“this is what you get”). For God’s sake, have you heard of the Norwegian Progress Party, of which this murderer was actually a member for a decade? They espouse all the views whose status you seek to raise in this post.
There are actual restrictions on political speech in various European countries; I am more familiar with the specifics in Germany and Britain (and know nothing about the specifics in Norway), but you shouldn’t assume that legal restrictions on the views you are allowed to express are ‘mythical’. They don’t have the first amendment and there are fairly vague laws against inciting hatred and the like.
On the other hand, 9/11 and so many other “foreign enemy” cases (think communists and whistle blowers) have consistently led the US down a legislative nightmare. We don’t get a “do-over” of 9/11, and its consequences certainly seem irreversible (they are being treated this way, and have ushered in an increasingly overbearing police force with expanding power).
I always thought that the US would end up like Huxley’s Brave New World. But it is turning toward Orwell’s 1984 – which may be a good thing, since the latter seems very unstable. At least the future may hold catharsis in the form of a collapse of the power structures in the US. As for Norway – I doubt that our perception says much about what its internal state is.
“Vulnerabillity is the price of living in a free and open society….”
Thank you, Aslak! Since living through the American political response to the 9/11 hijackings, I have been repeatedly disappointed by the lack of respect for core values here of a “free and open society.” I would argue that our “security-based response” was a capitulation rather than a display of strength. Judging from what I’ve been reading from coverage on Aftenposten and from folks like yourself all over the web, I think Norway will come through this committed more than ever to democratic values. And that makes me very happy for you (and a little envious).
It was more than just a hijacking–a few men with box cutters killed nearly 3,000 people. That is more people than were killed at Pearl Harbor by men flying in aircraft armed with machine guns, bombs, and torpedos. Yes, I agree the pendulum has swung too far on the other side, but if you didn’t see a response toward a more closed society coming, you’re being naive.
I’m glad to see that Aslak is predicting a mature, rather than an American, response. There isn’t much point in establishing high-tech granny-gropers is there?
Actually, a people who don’t feel the need to arm their police says they have nothing to say about America’s problems…ahem.
“‘Our punishment shall be more generosity, more tolerance, and more democracy.’ ~ Oslo mayor Fabian Stang”
Translation: more transfer payments, more immigration and more rent-seeking.
The democratic welfare state is a time-limited experiment, and that time is running out.
That’s a pretty gnostic response.
Time prevents me from listing all the ways the welfare state must suppress, distort and deny reality in order to prolong its existence.
The democratic welfare state is the only way to go. Yes, rent-seeking and unfair transfer payments are valid problems, as is the problems with immigration. However, in less democratic and less welfared states, we have similar problems like corruption, monopolization, etc. When systems get too big, as they tend to do in governments and businesses alike, things tend to go out of hand, and you get alienations of many kinds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation . Now, I am not a Marxist, just as I am no Freudian, but surely the guy has some points? Just as Locke does, Smith, etc…
What do you suggest as an alternative, Anti-Gnostic?
An absence of coercion to the greatest extent possible. Incentives for growth. Zero entitlements and a gov’t at perhaps 10-15% of GDP that provides only protection of our liberties and efficient regulation of the free market (mainly to keep it free of monopoly).
In the long run that would make us so much richer as a society that even the poorest quintile would be better off on the whole.
I think what he is saying, is that a democratic welfare state has a limited life span. It is not sustainable.
High taxes and crippling government regulation slowly destroy the economy that feeds the welfare state, while transfer payments turn into defacto vote-buying which destroys the democratic government.
The response, once the attacks happened, fell somewhat short of an optimal response, but nevertheless was well within bounds of what I’d call reasonable.
Offcourse getting armed police down on the island in half the time would have been desirable, but I’m not sure that having operative swat-teams on duty and with a sub-hour response time for all parts of Norway would be worth it. Furthermore nobody knows yet how much of an advantage that would’ve been. We know that aproximately 68 people died at Utøya – but we do not know what the death-toll would have been if the police-response-time was halved. (plausibly, most of the people shot where shot in the first 20 minutes after the shooting started)
Focus should be on trying to prevent something like this from happening again. Focus should also be on demonstrating practically that violence is not efficient in making us change our opinion, I hope and expect we’ll see a lot MORE support for, and activity in, the targeted political party, and not less like the attacker wished for.
At the same time, we should recognise that there are some dangers that you can’t prevent. You can perhaps reduce the dangers, but a risk remains. And the cost of reducing this risk further, is higher than the benefit. I’m talking cost in the sense of reduced freedoms or an increase in surveilance and police-state-powers here, rather than financial cost. I would, for example, prefer being allowed flying with a bottle of Coke, *even* knowing that this might in principle increase my chance of dying as a result of terrorism by a miniscule amount.
Your comment, demonstrates the difference in mind-set. The lack of a efficient police-response does not sting. To the contrary, I’m of the opinion that police appeared to mostly function as intended. (yes there was some minor fuckups, those always happen in real life, I’m prepared to live with that)
The loss of so many people, many of them young, stings offcourse. But the police was not the cause of that, and indeed I consider it likely that the end-result would’ve been very very similar, even if the police-response had been twice as quick.
What’s with the SWAT team thing? You need me. Really. I’m not all that. That’s the point.
I doubt your ability to draw, level and fire accurately without significant amounts of training. I also doubt you could do this without being spotted and gunned down yourself.
Literally millions of Americans have that ‘significant amount of training.’
“I doubt your ability to draw, level and fire accurately without significant amounts of training. I also doubt you could do this without being spotted and gunned down yourself.”
I know you doubt it because people playing your role in this debate always do. You simply can’t imagine an individual taking such training upon themselves and then acting on it in a situation. I understand.
And yet the psycho who almost always has zero training whatsoever in fact could outperform someone like me? Does that make sense? Of course there is a lot of randomness in gun fights, so who knows what would actually happen, but you do realize that the role you are playing here is nonsense, right?
You won’t believe this either, but I would do better than many “highly trained” cops. There are actual reasons for this. You won’t believe them. The fact that you don’t believe something has little bearing on reality. The fact that you believe something about the training that cops undertake doesn’t have any direct impact on reality. It is known that peoples’ beliefs don’t change reality. It is unfortunate when reality doesn’t change peoples’ beliefs.
And this is a red herring argument anyway. The point is not about me. The point is that there only needs to be a small percentage of people who take on the responsibility. We can even require them to have “The Training.” It couldn’t hurt.
I know you doubt it. I don’t care.
“When it comes to our debt-ceiling crisis, we are acting as if we will get a do-over for sure; I wonder if that’s justified.”
If the US has to go into more debt to service existing debt, then the “crisis” is that the US has gotten so over-extended in the first place. It doesn’t work with the schlep desperately rolling over credit card balances and it won’t work with the Treasury either.
The US has to go into more debt because Congress passed a budget forcing the US to go into more debt. There is no “need to go into more debt to service existing debt.” It just wasn’t politically palatable to pass a budget with the massive spending cuts or tax increases necessary to balance the budget this year.
It’s tough to make a credit card analogy, since Americans are not legally obligated to spend a certain amount of money like the US government is. But there are different levels of personal indebtedness. A doctor may come out of Med School with student loan debt many multiples of his income as a resident, but he pays low rates because of the debt relative to income (i.e. debt/GDP for countries). If Greece is the deadbeat with no access to credit cards, the US is (currently) the doctor with low debt to income and thus low market rates. America’s debt/GDP ratio is about half that of Greece.
Like I said, the analogy is tough because the doctor is not legally obligated to spend a certain amount of his income. But Congress legally requires the President to spend more than he takes in. Congress also controls the amount of debt that can be issued. To unnecessarily create a crisis now to perhaps forestall a crisis later, a crisis which may or may not happen in the first place, is beyond asinine. It’s even more asinine to not only insist on a balanced budget, but to also insist that budget be balanced with only spending cuts when revenues/GDP are at a historic low.
Again, the brinkmanship and fancy engraved paper is not the crisis. The crisis is more debt than can be repaid, causing all sorts of malinvestments and devouring capital. Face the facts: net payors are not going to pay higher marginal rates just because you tell them to, and net consumers are not going to vote for less benefits just because there’s no revenue to cover them. So you either whittle public expenditures down to a level that can be realistically covered by current tax collections, or the Gods of the Copybook Headings will whittle them down for you.
So are you arguing that the US has lots of murderous psychopaths that are voting to default on our sovereign debt? Or did you simply make a really terrible parallel?
I agree that this post was obviously pre-coffee.
Sorry Tyler this is just beneath your standards.
The crisis is the absurd amount of debt that cannot ever be paid off. If it were not for the debt ceiling debate, it could be anything over the next couple years that sets off this case of nitroglycerine sitting in the truck. Sooner or later it is going to blow up, period.
“the helicopter crew of the Oslo police force was on vacation.”
One problem with small sample sizes is that the observer has to assume that they are frequently on vacation if they observe 100% vacation.
Problems like this don’t necessarily imply the Oslo police need to become more heavily armed, etc.
They do suggest that the Oslo police never thought hard about a real emergency. They probably would have had the same disastrous response to a chemical plant fire or plane crash or any other tragedy they could potentially help ameliorate.
If the expected value of home insurance were positive for the purchaser, no one would sell it (or they wouldn’t be in business very long if they did). You don’t buy insurance because you expect your house to burn down, you buy it because catastrophic risk is not acceptable. Having armed police prepared to respond anywhere in the country is necessary for the same reason. Perhaps Americans realize that if having armed SWAT teams ready to deploy anywhere in the country deters or mitigates one catastrophic crime every hundred years, it would be worth it. Imagine how devastating the Virginia Tech massacre could have been if SWAT teams had not arrived within 10 minutes of the second shooting. The killer was already dead by then, but if he didn’t fear police response, he almost certainly would have continued killing, just like this psycho in Norway. No one at Virginia Tech expected the worst spree killing in US history, and the “expected value” of the SWAT team was low, but thank god they weren’t stupid enough not to prepare.
For a society that’s supposedly so open and compassionate, Norweigans don’t seem to care very much about potential victims of violent. The very use of the phrase “expected value”, when the payoff is in human life, suggests as much. They are either shockingly naive or disgustingly hypocritical.
SWAT teams are getting really good at keeping the crime scene investigators from getting shot before they go in to zip up the bodybags.
I’d agree, if the “cost” of a society where a more efficient response was likely was merely cash. We’ve got enough cash, afterall.
But policies such as having police-officers carry loaded weapons permanently, having armed guards at camps like these (and anywhere where people gather, really), installing metal-detectors and restricting access to school and universities, government-buildings and other high-risk (relatively speaking) targets, have substantial cost in terms of a more closed, more scared, less free society.
Giving up freedom to obtain security is not a obvious win, as you seem to imply.
Most of us have felt directly the loss of freedom and increase in hassle following the 9/11 attacks. We’re not convinced that that kind of response is the right one. There are situations where I’ll opt for more freedom — even knowing that this freedom comes at the price of increased vulnerability.
There are no simple, obvious, answers.
SWAT teams are basically the wrong solution for this type of thing. In the US, if memory serves, just about every one of these that has been stopped before the bad buy wanted it to stop was stopped by an individual or a pair with a handgun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shooter
SEALE Police Academy report
SEALE Police Academy (Bedford OH) manager Ron Borsch reports their research has determined that aggressive action — by even a single individual — is the most effective countermeasure in stopping the active shooter. For example, initially single unarmed civilians have accounted for half of mass-murder preventions.[3]
Exactly right. Even when it comes to medical emergencies as another example, the immediate response of everyday citizens, some without any training, is more effective and essential than the response of professionals and paraprofessionals.
A stitch in time…
One armed citizen could have brought that tragedy to an end after only a few deaths or injuries. Meanwhile, the armed citizen poses virtually no danger to anyone. More people cause injuries by carelessly wielding umbrellas or driving cars or riding bikes than with lawfully carried concealed weapons. More people cause harm to themselves through inattention on cell phones than by carrying concealed weapons.
The deniers of this reality are the true hysterical responders.
It’s possible that changing Norwegian culture into one where armed citizen response is likely and appropriate is a step that Norwegians as a whole are unwilling to take.
The mindset necessary is one which is rooted deep in the psyche. Not everyone can engage another human being lethally. Not everyone even wants to.
It’s certainly the case that Americans have a cultural baggage attached to the concept that’s missing in other cultures in the world.
You don’t actually even need armed citizens: Read the link
“The Hard Tactics researchers were completely surprised to find that in seventeen of the reviewed cases, the event was resolved by victims when confronting the shooter. In at least three cases, the shooters ceased their attacks when directly verbally confronted by someone they knew. In other cases, the shooters were overcome by physical confrontation by the intended victims.”
You just need someone to do something. I’m not going to recommend you tell people to take knuckles to a gunfight, but if your national culture precludes you from doing the first-best thing, then at least do the second best thing.
Really? There should have been dudes armed with 9s at a summer camp because that would have solved the problem? I don’t remember very many guns at my summer camp, and I grew up in Oklahoma where we love guns. Tsk-tsking Norwegians for not having an armed citizenry seems like a pretty bitchy response.
No Tommy. Read the link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shooter
Also, I would bet someone at your summer camp could have gotten hold of a gun if they needed to. At my summer camp, I received rifle shooting, shotgun, and archery merit badges. I was 11.
Cool story, bro!
This is also a serious commitment I’m talking about that several people are blowing off and diminishing. I’m not fucking around.
You’re not fucking around? Several people are blowing off and diminishing your commitment because you are a jagoff.
This.
Tommy,
Would you like to discuss something real or just keep showing your ass?
http://www.policeone.com/active-shooter/videos/3420581-Church-shooting-The-heroism-of-Jeanne-Assam/
Tommy,
Are you always this lame on every issue? Is there something that you know about that you’d like to discuss. I’ll talk about just about anything with anyone.
For the record, contrary to rumor, I am not and never have been a Jag Officer.
If I were Norwegian, I’d be happy if my country never got a do-over. Living with the notion that pretty much every citizen in my nation — including the authorities — is utterly incapable of standing up to a single gunman would be bad. granted, but far less bad than seeing the nation learn to defend itself reasonably effectively to a long line of gunmen. Israeli emergency response has been made excellent through practice. I’d rather live in Norway.
There are a number of stories being overlooked here.
Norway has obligatory military service yet nobody intervened to stop this mass public shooting.
Scaled people moving creates conflict be it ethnic cleansing in what is left of the original Palestine mandate, demographic flooding in Bosnia, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, or large inflows of non-European migrants into Europe.
Nobody wants to go back to race-based or ethnicity-based immigration rules such as those practiced by Israel. But reduced total immigration flows may help.
Odd. No one has pointed out that a group of unarmed youth could have rushed Breivik and stopped him. Do they not teach the future leaders of Norway that the only ethical solution to the trolley problem is to throw yourself in front of the train?
Do you know other active shooters that have been stopped similar to your suggestion?
Yes, there are. Luckily they are rare enough that few come to mind specifically, but the 2011 Tuscon shooting had people physically overcome the shooter during a reload.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting
A nearby store employee said he heard “15 to 20 gunshots”.[22] After the gunman ran out of ammunition in the first magazine, he stopped to reload, but dropped the loaded magazine from his pocket to the sidewalk, from where bystander Patricia Maisch grabbed it.[23] A bystander clubbed the back of the assailant’s head with a folding chair in the process injuring his elbow and representing the 20th injury.[24] The gunman was then tackled to the ground by 74-year-old retired US Army Colonel Bill Badger,[25] who himself had been shot, and was further subdued by Maisch and bystanders Roger Sulzgeber and Joseph Zamudio.[26]
But, it’s kind of a trick question because the reason shooter carries gun is to make it really hard for victim to be able to rush him without having an organized response from multiple victims.
Just because we don’t often rush the shooter, whether we’ve been conditioned to obey authority or simply a strong first-mover dilemma and likewise the cops haven’t often rushed these shooters, that doesn’t mean we should keep doing the wrong thing. It used to be policy to let hijackers have their way, then 9/11 and we changed the policy, particularly on Flight 93. Most of the change was wrong, but it certainly isn’t right to just let these guys wear themselves out.
That is a pretty good example. There is hope even in such out-armored circumstances.
Further, Rahul, since you actually want to learn stuff, almost all the recent shootings have been stopped by single officers. I don’t make a huge distinction between a single officer and a single citizen. The people who do make huge distinctions between the two are also the people who make it impossible for the citizen to act like the officer when required.
It’s too bad you weren’t there.
Not about me. Read the link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shooter
Here is the plan:
(1) Someone
(2) Do Something
You cited a wikipedia article, which makes you an expert on the internet. Keep the the work!
Tommy,
It gets old fast man. I can’t save the world. It’s not that reading a Wikipedia article makes me an expert. It is that a Wikipedia article shows how easy it would be for you to learn something.
NC Nursing Home – Single officer Intervention “In March 2009, Borsch’s strategy was affirmed by Officer Justin Garner of Carthage, North Carolina, when he made entry into a nursing home by himself to confront an active shooter who had already killed 8 people. Garner encountered the shooter, Robert Stewart, in a hallway and exchanged gunfire with him. Garner was shot in the leg but was able to disrupt Stewart’s plan by shooting him in the chest and taking him into custody. ”
Fort Hood Shooting – Resolved by (2) Single officer (Interventions, after the first was injured)
Colorado Springs Church – Single security guard
Tuscon Shooting – Resolved by unarmed citizens, although an armed citizen came on scene shortly after
Knoxville Church Shooting – citizens
Most others – stopped when gunmen got tired of killing, a few stopped by organized police unit response (not many)
It gets old fast? Every single one of your comments here is the same. We get it – you’re a tough guy. You would charge the killer, because you are a real man, a real American, unlike those wimpy Norwegians. Not one ounce of sympathy for them from you, never, because of how tough you are. Yawn.
“Every single one of your comments here is the same. We get it – you’re a tough guy. ”
No, you you obviously don’t get it. That’s why I have to keep repeating myself. The most genuine form of sympathy is solving the problem, which is universal, not nationalistic.
I would rush the attacker, preferably after getting some help organized. It is not because of factors that are unique to me, but factors that are universal to active shooter situations.
You aren’t listening and being arrogant about it.
Yes, it gets old when people can’t respond to the details of an issue and can only react with cliches as you, Tommy and others are doing.
I think it might depend on character of media more than size of the country.
American media made a huge deal out of 9/11. It was not an small thing, but it was proportionally-to-country-size-and-objective-impact comparable with plenty of other attacks and events in other countries which they cared about only moderately.
American media routinely make a huge deal out of pretty much anything. Even things that never deserved a single article like Terri Schiavo case, Obamacare’s death panels, Obama’s birth certificate, ACORN etc. were all blown way out of proportion.
The second factor is ease of change. American system has a lot of veto points. Norwegian system seems to as well, with its huge coalitions. They normally have huge inertia, and Bush was able to overcome it largely by ignoring veto points, and forcing Congress to deal with fait accompli where they had no easy way to refuse him (Iraq war, deterioration of civil rights, TARP, bailouts).
British system with very few veto points can change much more easily, and so it did under Blair (doubling of welfare state, Iraq War etc.), Brown (another bailout), and Cameron (complete removal of government funding for education, austerity, upcoming NHS reform).
It turns out for instance that the helicopter crew of the Oslo police force was on vacation.
I never thought we’d see a case where generous Nordic vacation policy was actually responsible for mass fatalities. I wonder if the murderer knew they were on vacation?
It also strikes me as odd that he didn’t actually target any Muslims, but instead targeted the gov’t and its leading party. This may be a result of the fact that Muslim militants have had some success in promoting their agenda (esp. suppressing criticism of Islam) through the threat of violence, and so the incentive has been created for Christian extremists to follow their example.
A unique feature of this shooting was that the shooter wanted to be (and was indeed)captured alive. To me this is an outlier. Have there been other shootings of similar magnitude where the killer did not die at the end?
A related speculation is whether this has anything to do with the Norwegian police response being different from the conditioned American one. In the US in a known situation of this sort would the responding officers have used lethal force, shot at sight, no questions asked?
I read that he set the bomb off first (possibly as a diversion to distract the police), he was dressed as a police officer, and, pretending to be a police officer, he had his victims gather near him before he started shooting. That seems pretty unique too.
Also, I read that Norway had 30-some murders last year. If so, then this killer probably doubled the number of murders in Norway this year. That probably doesn’t happen very often either.
Correct. For the last decade, the murder-rate has been 27/year to 66/year. We’re only 5 million people, so you should adjust for that if comparing to USA. If USA had 1500 – 4000 killings a year, then that’d be comparable per capita. But the real number for USA is something like 1700, so we’re talking 5 to 10 times as high numbers.
This, among other things, contribute to widespread scepticism when Americans claim that the thing to do to reduce killings, is to follow the lead of USA. Following the lead of someone who’s got 5 to 10 times your own murder-rate doesn’t, at a first glance, strike many as a good idea.
More armed citizens will prevent murders, we hear. But when we look at the real world, we do not recognise this as true. USA does have more armed citizens, but despite this you’ve got substantially more murders, not less.
Furthermore, essentially all murders we *have* had has been either in near relations, or in criminal gangs. Essentially nobody outside of organized criminal gangs have been murdered by anyone except for their own closest family and friends. Police-response is fairly irrelevant to the risk that a jealous boyfriend will kill his girlfriend. And many people think that widespread handgun-availability in private homes might actually *increase* jealousy-killings and the like, and thus do more harm than it prevents.
If the chance of getting shot by your spouse, is 20 times higher than the chance of being shot by a burglar, does it really make you safer to have more houses contain handguns ? The answer isn’t obvious.
You are making strawman arguments.
Fine, don’t arm your citizens. But how about arming your police, at least? That would be a good start.
How about training them properly? Never mind the inexcusably slow car trip from Oslo… how about merely training them how to get in a boat without nearly sinking it, and how to cross half a kilometer of lake water in less than 23 minutes?
How about investing some of your national budget surplus of 10% into buying a second helicopter for the police? How about arranging for helicopter crews to not all take vacations at the same time…
How about fixing whatever problem it was that caused nearly a 40-minute delay from the first shots being fired to the local police even being aware of it? This in a time and place where practically everyone has a mobile phone. Were emergency calls for help being filtered out and ignored?
For some questions the answers are obvious.
It isn’t obvious, although the issue at hand isn’t domestic violence.
However, considering our murder ratio is I’ll grant you 10x our gun ration is what, infinity? So, maybe there is more to it than gun availability?
Or just accept the current thinking encapsulated in The Active Shooter protocol and all the gritty details follow from there.
Use sharp sticks. I don’t care.
They said of Mussolini that he made the trains run on time. I.e., fascism supposedly brings about prompt and timely services.
This is already pretty dubious, But now it seems, unbelievably, that some here are coming close to arguing for this kind of “causation” in reverse: that a prompt and timely police response would somehow cause fascism. There is almost a perverse pride: See? Our cops are reassuringly bumbling! That means we’re not a police state like those nasty Americans!
As it becomes clear just how many of the young people died long after the start of the massacre (there are already hints of this in news reports), we can but hope that this smug and complacent attitude will be punctured for good.
It’s not the efficiency and preparedness of the police, nor how fast they show up at the scene of an emergency, that determines whether you’re in a police state; it’s what the police do after they show up. Get busy on that first part, Norway. It’s not a threat to your way of life, I promise.
Excellent comment!
Though I’d add that resources are not infinite. For a low density, relatively crime free population like Norway’s the optimum size and money devoted to police teams will likely be lower than many other nations. Ultimately it is all a cost-benefit analysis (no matter how harsh that sounds when so many lives have been lost). What seems reasonable right after a disaster is often knee jerk and not sustainable in the long run.
Efficiency, preparedness and response time all cost money.
You do realize that Norway has a ton of oil wealth, right? And unlike most countries they have avoided the resource curse and have been investing it wisely. They have a budget surplus of about 10%. Their police force can afford more than one helicopter.
Contingency planning and imaginative thinking is free. It apparently never occurred to them to hitch a ride on one of the helicopters owned by the news media, which got to the scene well before they did. Or to make prearrangements with some other industry that operates helicopters, like the oil industry.
Driving 28 miles (45 km) by car is unforgivable. Careers need to end over this. Even worse, the police arrived at the lake around 6 pm but in part because of a tragicomical episode involving all of them piling into the same boat with their heavy equipment and nearly sinking it, it wasn’t until 6:25 that they reached the island. More than 20 minutes to cross 600 yards of water.
They spent far too much time preparing and fussing over their equipment and making sure that everything was “just so”, like some debutante primping in front of a mirror and endlessly trying on different dresses and makeup, when all she needs to do is JUST SHOW UP. Two or three cops simply rushing in with pistols and no body armor would have made a big difference.
These are obtuse and phlegmatic bureaucrats who need to be reassigned to fulfulling careers in telephone sanitization or floral arrangement. The only one who showed imagination and careful planning was the killer.
One more thing: the shooting started around 4:50 pm (and was heard in the campground across the lake), but the official line is that the local police were not notified until 5:26 pm. Every single young person on the island probably had a mobile phone or smartphone, yet somehow it took more than half an hour for the very first emergency call to even get through? There are various possible explanations here, none of them good. And then the local police merely notified Oslo and sat back and waited, because they were unarmed.
Finland had two school shootings, in 2007 and 2008, neither of them near a major metropolis. Did the Norwegian police not learn from their northern neighbors undertake even the most minimal contingency planning to deal with a gunman in a slightly out-of-the-way location?
Police states are completely different. They have a bunch of uniformed officers with or without sub-machine guns on their shoulder for show and not action. Those clowns would have no idea how to address an active shooter. They expect their show of force to keep citizens in line, not actually address an aggressor. It’s at least a Punnet square rather than linear.
Boy, this comment thread is really full of unsubstantiated, lazy-ass, stereotype-based smears against people who are even now literally burying their children. Yeah guys, we get it, you’re American conservatives who hate Europe. But this isn’t the time or the place. Sirs, at long last, etc etc.
You forgot to add stuff about watching Fox News all the time, forcing a militant culture down Europe’s throat, or that Europe is good at talking and having “serious discussions on issues” and nothing more (sarcasm).
I think everyone here greatly dissaproved of what happened, mourns the dead, and the horrors the victims had to go through without having to put an asterisk on everything they write.
Sorry if it’s too soon for some who need a little more time for affect, but for those of us who don’t know any Norwegians and would just like fewer of them to die due to wrong police tactics when would it be acceptable to talk about the actual solution?
Tyler, don’t know what you are smoking, there are no second acts in American lives.
I think this is eye-opening for all sides of the political spectrum:
http://vepsen.org/2011/07/norway-the-climate-that-killed/
To me local politics are pretty irrelevant. The tactics to deal with active shooters is the same whether there many or few incidents, whether they are Islamic or Aryan, anything. I’m adamant about this because we know this one.
The bottom line is that if good guys with guns don’t show up at some point, the bad guy would still be shooting, assuming he brought enough ammo.
But, if that’s too much for people to take, I propose a Hero Insurance policy. Considering that what is needed is action, and armed action is more effective, but not absolutely necessary, anyone, armed or not, who is injured or killed confronting one of these active shooter guys gets cash for themselves or their beneficiaries.
Here is a passive response product
http://www.youtube.com/user/countycomm#p/u/48/yno2Op7WUpY
Here is a good video for classrooms
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2tIeRUbRHw
Looks impossible doesn’t it.
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