What is perhaps not so shocking is that this crime took place, given the rhetoric of the right and the "bubble" a lot of the right-wing pundits appear to live in. I think it is noteworthy that most successful politically-motivated violent attacks come from right-wing or anarchist groups and they are nearly always aimed at government or prominent left-wing figures. You very rarely hear of a left-wing attack on a right-wing politician (ok I guess Reagan and Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands are the most obvious exceptions), and I think there is good reason for this. The main reason is that the left wing are by definition a more community-oriented social party, whereas the right wing tends to believe in more individual autonomy and freedom. Most-definitely-right-of-centre Mrs. Thatcher once famously said "And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." which I think encapsulates the way in which many on the right think. So when society doesn't go their way, they sometimes seek to change it by attacking the guts of how societies operate - that is the system of government and the politics that comprise it. History is littered with examples of anarchists and righ-wingers who have done this - from Timothy McVeigh to the Unibomber, to now the Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik.
What I find stunning in all this is the reaction of some on the right - I read in the Christian Post that the attacks have exposed "European Immigration Issues", in a way trying to find a silver lining in the fact that a man killed nearly over 70 people. Surely the issue is that one man killed 76 people in a clear attempt to strike out at government and eliminate the next generation of leftist politicians who he thought of as the Labor party youth wing who had convened for a summer camp west of Oslo.
We all want to be proactive to prevent the kinds of massacres that have been witnessed in Norway. But i) there are unintended consequences of allowing all students and professors to hold guns on campuses or elsewhere for that matter; ii) once a law is passed allowing people to do something it is very difficult to remove that "right", so this basically becomes a one-way street. The real question is, is there another (better) way to allow better regulation of guns so that more of these isolated incidents can be prevented, while at the same time mitigating the unintended consequences of more widespread carrying of guns? I am not sure I know the answer to this question, but of course I have some ideas!
I would suspect that in a country like Norway, and likely now other Nordic countries, more gun controls will be put in place as despite the isolated nature of this incident, the authorities will take steps to ensure that this never happens again. And I would also suspect that in Texas someone will have another go at introducing legislation to allow concealed weapons on campuses - this time it failed, but it only needs to pass once and then it will be the norm and we'll be experiencing any "unintended consequences"!
It's no surprise that right-wing extremism and religious fundamentalism are yet again at the center of terror. Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, and Breivik are the most notable examples. I would throw a few others into the mix, such as Jared Lee Loughner who shot Gabrielle Giffords - despite his likely schizophrenia and his paranoid predispositions, he embraced the views found at the heart of right-wing conspiracy theories: a secret cabal seeking to establish a bureaucratic collectivist one world government under the moniker "New World Order", and all of the conspiracy theories that cascade downward (9/11 Inside Job, FEMA Death Camps, Federal Reserve Ownership, Chemtrails, et al.). Just last year in fact, or perhaps the year before, the FBI arrested a group of Christian fundamentalists who embraced millenarianism and were training for a plot to plant bombs in a cemetery and blow up police attending an officer's funeral, and then attack survivors and first responders with firearms. Scholars of conspiracy theories such as Michael Barkun and Chip Berlet often link the embrace of far right-wing views and borderline paranoid schizophrenia, and suggest that they're common among conspiracists spreading counterknowledge.
ReplyDeleteThankfully we have law enforcement tirelessly working, but we have to make sure we don't abuse innocent citizens (with garbage like the PATRIOT Act), or incite the very terrorism that spits at us (through our foreign policy: illegitimate wars, financing and arming oppressors of people living under would-be democracies). Noam Chomsky has a lot of great literature on America's dirty history and the breakdown in America's foreign policy not reflecting what most average citizens consider to be our true "American values" (liberty, prosperity, peace, security). More people hate us for our foreign deeds rather than our lifestyle's conflict with their faith. It'd be so interesting to see what trials would follow if we held our military and political leaders accountable by ratifying the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, because they don't seem to be accountable to us for the things they do to others using our taxes and our youths.
Gun control is perhaps the one thing I am most torn on. I have not been able to fully justify hopping down onto one side of the fence. On the one hand, I'm a "Texan" who very well accepts the rationales offered in name of self-defense and family protection (even recreation). Albeit anecdotal, who can argue that a criminal walking into a town where he suspects each citizen is armed is less likely to rob anyone there, versus the criminal walking into a town where he suspects he is the only one armed? It's a simplification, but well-reasoned. I also wonder what things might have been like in scenarios like the Rwandan Genocide - would "as many" people have been slaughtered without opposition if the majority of Tutsi citizens had been armed with firearms? After all, most of the killing was carried out by youthful Hutu militias such as the Interahamwe who used machetes that the extremist Hutu Government imported from China at 10 cents a piece! The very visible example of "nuclear deterrence" (Mutually assured destruction) would seem to justify a situation where multiple parties being armed makes each party think twice.
However, I am very concerned about so many weapons manufactured in the US and Europe making their way into the hands of very immature and unjustifiable hands. Some probably chalk that up as a symptom of a military-industrial complex. While I think personal protection is important, I abhor interest groups like the National Rifle Association, which is really nothing other than a huge lobbying arm of gun manufacturers - I don't think they have any genuine interest in preserving the 2nd Amendment's "Right to Bear Arms" (they read it as "to Buy Arms").
Interesting blog Dr. Crowley but poor analysis…
ReplyDeleteHow easy it is to focus on an isolated incident from the radical right and somehow conclude that it is the right’s ideologies that lead to such travesties in the world since your rationale seems to be that the left has always had mankind’s best interest at heart. I suppose then one can be forgiving to the likes of Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin; who imposed their visions of great societies for the common good of the masses but came with hefty prices, some of which is still reverberating today. The riots in Greece, extreme PETA or Greenpeace activists, Arab Spring - Libyan Rebels, etc…which have caused considerable damage and do not appear to me a peaceful bunch but can be more forgiving since it is covered under the umbrella of the ‘intent’ of the greater good.
As for the merits or demerits of gun control laws themselves, a vast amount of evidence, both from the United States and from other countries, shows that keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens does not keep guns out of the hands of criminals. It is not uncommon for a tightening of gun control laws to be followed by an increase-- not a decrease-- in gun crimes, including murder.
We hear a lot about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have lower murder rates. But we very seldom hear about countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States that have higher murder rates, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico.
Some of our biggest political fallacies come from accepting words as evidence versus realities. …For example, ‘gun control’ laws do not control guns. The District of Columbia’s very strong laws against gun ownership have done nothing to stop the high murder rate in Washington. New York had very strong gun control laws decades before London did. But the murder rate in New York has been some multiple of that in London for more than two centuries, regardless of which city had the stronger gun control laws at a given time. Back in 1954, when there were no restrictions on owning shotguns in England and there were far more owners of pistols then than there were decades later, there were only 12 cases of armed robbery in London. By the 1990s, after stringent gun controls laws were imposed, there were well over a thousand armed robberies a year in London. In the late 1990s, after an almost total ban on handguns in England, gun crimes went up another ten percent. The reason — too obvious to be accepted by the intelligentsia — is that law-abiding people became more defenseless against criminals who ignored the law and kept their guns.