Friday, April 20, 2012

Blog 13: Norway's Breivik gives Chilling Account of Gun Massacre


         My final blog is particularly upsetting because this story though it follows a long pattern of hate and extremist crimes, does not have religious purposes behind it but something much harder to grasp.  A man named Anders Behring Breivik has admitted to killing 77 people in Norway last summer. During his first trial he has given chilling details at of the gun rampage in which he systematically shot dead several young people. Without showing any emotion, he recounted firing more bullets into teenagers who were injured and so they couldn't escape, killing those who tried to "play dead" and driving others into the sea to drown.This heinous crime all occurred on Utoya Island in which 69 people died. His charges were of voluntary homicide and committing acts of terror, he even brags about being an ultranationalist who killed these people to fight multiculturalism in Norway. Breivik told the court he had made use of lessons learned from al Qaeda in planning his attacks, and was “inspired by the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings.”
            What is so disturbing about this particular story is that the reasons behind this man’s killings mirror that of dictators like Hitler and Stalin, where a goal is not to prove a point but just perform an ethnic cleansing. The shooter was even quoted as saying that the voices of 100 men in his head told him to commit this crime. It really makes me wonder how much of this crime involves sanity, and how much involves actual hatred towards multiculturalism. It is hard to say how we can prevent crimes like this, but one step would be to make equal rights to all types of people a more prevalent priority globally so that children may grow up in an equal society instead of growing up in a world with predetermined stereotypes.  

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