The Shooting at Utøya and the Bomb in Oslo

I went onto Facebook yesterday morning and was looking at what people had been doing lately. The suddenly I read my aunt's status updates: "I'm safe, but that was a big bang." I wondered what she was writing about and I read the various comments on it, most of those didn't really say what had happened either but one of my aunt's comments was that they had moved into a different room because the windows had been vibrating. I scrolled up to see if I could find out more. Many of my friends had put "This is horrible!" or "I can't believe it!" as their updates, but none of them had written WHAT it was about. Then the same aunt as before had written something about how people shouldn't blame Muslims and immigrants for what was going on because they didn't know anything for sure yet.


I had no idea what had happened, but I figured there had been a bomb going off, so I googled "Oslo bomb" and got loads of recent articles up. 


A bomb had gone off in Oslo's central government district, killing 7 people and wounding many more. There was also someone dressed in a police jumper killing people at a political youth camp at Utøya, which is an island near the capital. It's the biggest attack on Norway since the second World War. In the Norwegian articles they weren't directly blaming anyone, but they did write about how Norway has a lot of soldiers in Afghanistan and Libya, and how we don't have any sort of protection against these sort of assaults. Then I read an article that was slightly more updated that a blond white man had been arrested for the shootings on the island.

I rang my dad, in case he'd been anywhere near where the bomb when off. He was fine. He was at home, a fair bit outside Oslo, on holiday and even if he had been working he works in entertainment, not news. The rest of my family, except for a couple of aunts, lives a long, long way from Oslo.

The news articles were saying that since it was a white man that had been arrested it was probably political. His name is Anders Behring Breivik, he's 32. What can drive a man to kill nearly 100 people, of those SHOOT more than 80 young people (the numbers are still rising), teenagers, people that hasn't done anything wrong.

They are currently blaming him for both the bomb and the shootings. People are saying they want the death penalty to be used in Norway, I say: Why should he get the easy way out? If you kill him, he won't suffer for what he's done. One thing I don't like though is that "life" in Norway is only 21 years, people usually get out early on grounds of good behavior as well... Maybe they should leave him tied up in a room and let the parents of the people he killed have a go at him.

I'm against the death penalty and I'm against torture, but when people do things like this it could be very easy for me to change my mind. What would be a suitable punishment for him? Apparently Norwegian prisons are very "comfortable", so I don't know if staying in prison for the full 21 years he'll probably get is bad enough.

I just read that Breivik has admitted to mass-murder. In one way I'm glad it's a Norwegian, if it had been a foreigner, many Norwegians would have become more racist than they already are.

I'm just glad no one I know is killed or hurt, it would have been hard to be all the way down here in Australia if there was.

It's so strange to know that something like this has happened in Norway though. Nothing happens in Norway. Norway has been on Australian news! Hopefully Norway will get better at surveillance (like maybe CCTV type things) and other security measures now.

Here is a link to a post written by a girl who survived the shooting. It's in Norwegian, but you can probably use a translation program if you want, there are a few typos, but you'll probably be able to understand from the context: http://prableen.origo.no/-/bulletin/show/672218_helvete-paa-utoeya?ref=mst