Mass Shooters: Insane Or Ideological (Or Both)?

I’ve been meaning to add a few comments concerning the appalling mass murder atrocity in Uvalde, Texas.

As a parent, I’m horrified and heartbroken.

Can’t even fathom what these parents are going through.

This shooting followed another one in Buffalo, NY by Payton Gendron which appeared to be racially motivated.

There’s so much that I could say regarding why I think this keeps happening (especially in America), but I’ll save that for another time. There are clear patterns, but I think reducing it all to racism or gun rights is an oversimplification of a much bigger problem.

Insane or ideological?

Merv Bendle hit the nail on the head in a Quadrant piece years after Anders Behring Breivik did the same thing in Norway.

Everyone should by now be fully aware of the unforgivable evil that Anders Behring Breivik committed on the island of Utoya, Norway.

In such cases the death penalty should be used as the only adequate form of retribution.

What warrants serious criticism however is the way that the left-wing, mainstream media across the Western world reported on the atrocity by its identification of Breivik as a conservative, Christian nationalist or “Christofascist”, and by landing serious accusations against the good people that he referenced (among whom was our former PM John Howard, George Pell, Ghandi and Winston Churchill) while calling for further limitations on (conservatives’) freedom of speech.

Before the 1500-page manifesto was even public knowledge, the media was opportunistically proclaiming his alleged religious affiliation based on the information listed on his Facebook page, while causing mass hysteria over what Merv Bendle rightly describes as “the myth of right-wing terrorism”.

It’s all utter nonsense.

To quote Bendle:

Where right-wing individuals or cells do emerge, as with Timothy McVeigh or Breivik, they appear to be lone-wolf terrorists with little or no operational or ideological infrastructure to support them, and their attacks are completely counter-productive to the causes they profess to be supporting.

The fact is that people like Salvador Rolando Ramos, Breivik and so on are either lunatics or utterly evil or both, almost always act alone, live in a fantasy world concocted by their own mind (Breivik regarded himself as a “Knight Templar”), and most notably they act completely contradictory to the ideology they claim to represent.

We don’t yet know if Salvador Rolando Ramos was ideological or just totally deranged.

In Breivik’s case, he declared that his motivation for murdering almost 100 innocent people was his opposition to multiculturalism and Islam, and yet the people he killed were native Norwegians - not immigrants.

With regards to Christianity, he openly declared in his writings that he’s not a practicing believer at all but rather a “cultural Christian”, and sympathetic to paganism and Hinduism.

It needs to be made abundantly clear that he didn’t kill in the name of any faith or divine decree whatsoever so it’s deliberately irresponsible journalism to describe him so.

Contrast Breivik with Brenton Tarrant in NZ who did indeed target an immigrant community (I suspect Tarrant was closer to Ramos in that he was simply an evil character and void of empathy).

I just wanted to get this off my chest because quite a few prominent, conservative public figures, many of whom I hold in the highest regard, are routinely attacked by the liberal media who try desperately to blacken their names after these evil events, as if the influence of conservatives is somehow a contributing factor.