11–20 of 144 posts
A white lie, I'm afraid. Lex Breivik [1] has changed the laws so that regional security departments have a lot more power, in fact more power than what prisons have as of today.
[1]: http://www.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=no&...
While I understand the point being made, Breivig apparently acted alone, and his actions were most similar to Timothy McVeigh. The proper comparison would be to compare changes in policy following Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing. After the bombing of Khobar Towers, the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombing of the USS Cole, and finally the acts of 9…
Sobering. I cringe every time I remember that it is likely that someone will propose metal-detectors at movie theaters now.
Back in 2000, Israel had a series of suicide bombing attacks, which resulted (among other things) in a law requiring every mall, restaurant, cafe, theatre, office buildings and many other businesses to have a full time security guard who will check every person coming in with a metal detector.
There were a lot of cries about how useless and what a waste of money that was (as, of course, the cost was shifted to the customers). However, it turned out to be a deterrent in a strange way:
There were several cases of suicide bombing later that year, in which the bomber saw the guard, and decided to go to an unguarded place (most establishments observed this law, but not all). In one case, there was no visible unguarded place, so the bomber blew themselves up in the middle of a busy crosswalk.
I think the bottom line is that these measures did not change the overall outcome, which was just as tragic, but they did manage to shift the locations of the events.
While I understand the point being made, Breivig apparently acted alone, and his actions were most similar to Timothy McVeigh. The proper comparison would be to compare changes in policy following Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing. After the bombing of Khobar Towers, the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombing of the USS Cole, and finally the acts of 9…
Changing laws that could negatively impact millions of people because of the statistically extremely small amount of people killed in mass shootings is just the kind of overreaction the article is talking about.
If you want to debate gun laws you have to weigh the rights of gun owners with the rights of people killed every year. Our policies shouldn't be based on statistically insignificant, but emotional charged tragedies.
Even the Obama administration has said it is against calling for more gun regulation because of this.
This man was apparently very smart and motivated, there was nothing we could have realistically done to prevent this. Look at Norway, they have stricter gun regulation than we do, yet they still had a mass shooting with a death toll that dwarfs anything we've seen.
a. It was domestic terrorism. Compare it to American reaction to domestic terrorism before 9/11 and we may start to have some actual merit in the comparison. There was no "War on terror" on the same scale after the Oklahoma City bombing (1995). b. There's a very different social reaction to domestic terrorism ("there's something rotten in us, we can fix this from the inside") and terrorism from the outside ("we're be…
Quite possibly the worst comparison I've ever seen. You're taking a country that not only has an incredibly low crime rate (they had 5 homicides in the entire country in 2009) and only has a population around 5 million. By comparison, Chicago has close to 3 million people just in the city. To try and compare our reaction to terrorism and how the Norwegians reacted to their recent mass killing is completely absurd.
I usually like Mr. Schriener's work, but this post is a little off.
a. It was domestic terrorism. Compare it to American reaction to domestic terrorism before 9/11 and we may start to have some actual merit in the comparison. There was no "War on terror" on the same scale after the Oklahoma City bombing (1995). b. There's a very different social reaction to domestic terrorism ("there's something rotten in us, we can fix this from the inside") and terrorism from the outside ("we're be…
Is this not a little dangerous surely if we take this over to USA where gun ownership is part of their core values?
Quite possibly the worst comparison I've ever seen. You're taking a country that not only has an incredibly low crime rate (they had 5 homicides in the entire country in 2009) and only has a population around 5 million. By comparison, Chicago has close to 3 million people just in the city. To try and compare our reaction to terrorism and how the Norwegians reacted to their recent mass killing is completely absurd.
Seems to me like they are doing something right.
Probably apocryphal, but it does draw attention to the role that cultural differences play in what sort of rules you can implement in organizing a society.
a. It was domestic terrorism. Compare it to American reaction to domestic terrorism before 9/11 and we may start to have some actual merit in the comparison. There was no "War on terror" on the same scale after the Oklahoma City bombing (1995). b. There's a very different social reaction to domestic terrorism ("there's something rotten in us, we can fix this from the inside") and terrorism from the outside ("we're be…
What about the London tube/bus suicide bombings: those were domestic terrorism and elicited a distinctly different response than we're seeing in Norway now. Or is it only domestic terrorism when the perpetrators are white one wonders!
Any Brit here caring to comment on British public perception of the tubes bombing? Would you say it's considered domestic terrorism in Britain? Please chime in.
EDIT: in any case, while this IS an interesting discussion (about the tubes), British reaction to terrorism does not reflect on the original comparison and points, so far anyway. Just want to mark different discussions and tangents as different.