Nick: It’s not much consolation, but the Norway mass murderer (whose name, like the names the Sikh temple shooter or Gabby Giffords’s shooter or the Batman shooter, should be repeated as little as possible, since public exposure is what they crave) will likely spend the rest of his life in prison, since Norway apparently has “preventive detention” after a sentence has been completed. Though, of course, “the rest of his life” should last only until the authorities finish preparing the gas chamber or the gallows.
But “Rassenreinheitseinsatzgrupp” isn’t the right epithet in this case. I have no doubt the creep hates foreigners, but the site of his crimes was not “a summer camp for immigrant children” nor were the victims mainly “immigrant children” — it was a camp for the socialist youth organization, and only a handful of the dead were of non-Norwegian origin. The names of the 77 victims, which should be publicized whenever possible, are listed here.
The absurd sentence did not stem from the fact that Norway “evaluate[s] its own immigrant children’s lost lives as being worth so very, very little.” Rather, Norway, like the rest of the developed world, has become so decadent that it can no longer take the vigorous measures any society needs to defend itself. A self-confident society that wasn’t apologizing for its ancestors and guilty about it success would, in an orderly, law-based fashion, put this fiend to death. He’s laughing all the way to the jailhouse.