I would lump him into the same category as a rabid dog -- maybe not 'to be punished' but you still put him down all the same.Also, this guy is definitely full goose bozo. The only group i would truly associate him with are the criminally insane. There should be a call for blood for this psycho. 21 years would not satisfy me if i was a family member of one of the slain.If he's truly a criminally insane psycho, we shouldn't be calling for his blood. If he's criminally insane, he's not responsible for his actions and should not be punished. He should be treated and held as long as he's a danger to himself or others.
That's the whole point of "criminally insane".
Mind you, I'm not making any argument about whether he is or is not. I'm not qualified and diagnosing through news reports is stupid anyway.
Thus: lock up to prevent harm. Treat if you can.
Would you "put down" the rabid dog if we could cure rabies?
Not that I'm saying we can cure this guy, just stretching the analogy.
"There should be a call for blood for this psycho" doesn't sound like "I don't think he'll be safe in 21 years" to me. Vengeance or punishment of someone who is actually crazy is wrong.
Well if there was an actual cure we wouldn't be putting the dog down would we?
I am not trying to suggest that the case shouldn't be considered carefully, only that there are some that upon proper reflection of the details of the case that the only correct solution is to remove them completely -- this shouldn't be done in malice or as a punishment though, simply done in the same way that you would put down a family dog that has contracted rabies.
I can understand what you are saying -- simply stating my position on the topic.
He could get sentenced to 21 years and 'forvaring' or containment, which is a type of indefinite detention with review to see if he is still a danger to society every 5 years or so after the first 21. So a life sentence is a possibility.
Or a danger to himself, or perhaps in danger of being lynched. Those too are locked away for all eternity.
Life is a possibility, but those tend to have a max timespan.
In that sense, asylum is worse as theres a good chance of never getting out. Massmurderers of little children have rights, insane people less so ;)
One of the interesting aspects of the whole trial is whether he should be deemed criminally insane because of his actions or because of the reason for his actions.
If it's the reason, then a whole bunch of other people would fit the same category. For instance, the English Defence League, a right-wing anti-muslim group verging on the brink of being neo-nazis, have said that they agree with Breivik's rhetoric, but not his actions.
One could also say that he's delusional and that is what caused him to go to such extremes, but we see examples of other people who also hold very, to most of us, delusional views of the world (and yes, I'll have to point to some religious people - believing in actual demons and devils, waging war on the "infidels," forgoing medical treatment and instead relying on faith "healing" and exorcism, etc.). Luckily only few of them act upon them.
I have to admit I don't really grok the whole "not guilty by reason of insanity." I mean, sanity isn't a binary thing; it's a spectrum. EVERYONE is "insane" to some extent. We're all walking around with meat-computers in our heads, dictating our actions, that may be more or less broken or erratic in various areas or types of processing activity.
While the usual quasi-shrinks has tried to jump on the "DANGEROUS GAMER" stereotype in Norwegian media, it seems it's more of a point to foreign press here...
Hell, even the second analysis of his mental state stated that due to the whole organising thing in WoW and Modern Warfare meant that he couldn't have had some of the things the first analysis said he suffered from.
The first days of the trial seems to be all about the prosecuters (spelling? My law-english isn't very good...) trying to make him seem like a pathetic liar, but his defense is all about him posing as smart. This whole thing is bizarre.
But then again, we haven't had to deal with this kind of crime since world war 2, so the whole judical system isn't exactly prepared for this.
Anyway, his sense of reality seems to be rather selective. The fact that he played games and locked himself away from reality combined with just hanging out at extremists forums might not have helped that selective reality. That's how I see it anyway, not that I an claim to be a specialist :)
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I’m somewhat surprised that the reporting that Breivik was a WoW player is coming as news to people at this stage; it was quite widely reported in the weeks after his arrest.
And it does have a fairly direct link to the case given that, at the time of his arrest, Breivik claimed to have used WoW – including attending conventions or visiting WoW friends in other countries – as a cover for conversing and meeting with fellow members of this ‘Knights Templar’ group or network that he claims to be part of. He also strongly emphasised the role that the Modern Warfare game played in his ‘training’.
Because people typically demand links for these sort of things instead of doing their own research, see here.
One of the interesting aspects of the whole trial is whether he should be deemed criminally insane because of his actions or because of the reason for his actions.
If it's the reason, then a whole bunch of other people would fit the same category. For instance, the English Defence League, a right-wing anti-muslim group verging on the brink of being neo-nazis, have said that they agree with Breivik's rhetoric, but not his actions.
One could also say that he's delusional and that is what caused him to go to such extremes, but we see examples of other people who also hold very, to most of us, delusional views of the world (and yes, I'll have to point to some religious people - believing in actual demons and devils, waging war on the "infidels," forgoing medical treatment and instead relying on faith "healing" and exorcism, etc.). Luckily only few of them act upon them.
Thing is, it's NEITHER. Killing people does not mean you are insane. Holding fanatic views doesn't make you insane. Sane people can hold precisely ANY views, and sane people have done far worse than Breivik as regards killing.
Insanity in this regard means that you are either psychotic or delirious, and have a severely lacking comprehension of reality due to this, or you are in the same situation due to severe mania or depression. The relevant aspect is "could he at all make sense of reality as it was?" Now, lots of people have various delusional views, whether it's about the CIA coming to get them, about jewish control of the media, about angels and demons and Hell being real, about immigration being the root of all evil, about history being mainly lies, about alien abductions, about all democrats or all republicans being baby-eating monsters, about gay people being a tumour on the body of society, about the world ending and the only way to join the spaceship is committing suicide, about the US being allied with Satan... and it's not the belief, but the person's ability to understand reality at all that is relevant. It's not what a paranoid person says that gives him away, but HOW he says it. Believing that angels and demons are real is not cause for getting committed to an asylum, but that belief may be one aspect of a much wider disorder that is. When you talk to people far to the extreme ranges of human political thought, they are not typically psychotic, but rather FANATIC. Fanaticism is a result of a person having isolated his views from other sources of information, often due to a limited contact with other views, and a dogmaticism that sees faith as good and doubt as heresy. Go far enough there, and you get fanatics. The process isn't that long and the results are often monstrous. You don't need to be a mass murderer to be a fanatic - all that is required is that you consider your views more important than whether others suffer or not. Parents that consider their homosexual children to be abominations is a typical and very common sort of fanatic. Nobody is claiming these people are psychotic, and no sensible psychiatric evaluation would show most of them as such either. Neither is Breivik psychotic, he is merely someone who chose to communicate only with people who held certain views to the point that he believed it enough to commit mass murder.
But doesn't mass murder prove you're psychotic? No. Nazi propaganda was a very good example of how certain groups of people were systematically stripped of their humanity in the eyes of the audience. Some from that audience proceeded to kill those groups, and nor would these people be considered psychotic. It behooves us all to consider carefully the messages we get from those in power: Are they designed to strip someone of their humanity? Humans only find it difficult to kill other humans, is the sad take home message. And it's not as if those messages aren't used today. Blacks, criminals, pedophiles, terrorists, copyright infringers, men, there are all sorts of people that others want you not to consider human.
I have to admit I don't really grok the whole "not guilty by reason of insanity." I mean, sanity isn't a binary thing; it's a spectrum. EVERYONE is "insane" to some extent. We're all walking around with meat-computers in our heads, dictating our actions, that may be more or less broken or erratic in various areas or types of processing activity.
Consider that you happened to be in a situation where you think you were about to be eaten by Demons, or sent by Evil men to torture and disposal. What would you do when they finally came for you? Yeah. You would probably get violent. Perhaps you'd first try fleeing, but if you couldn't, things would eventually degenerate. It is the normal human reaction to the threat of being eaten by Demons. Now, nobody chooses to become psychotic, not even the addict who injects amphetamine and becomes paranoid. Thus, due to circumstances outside your control, you will have become violent, in a situation where most of humanity would have reacted the same way. Should you then be punished for acting consistently with the rest of humanity? No, of course not. Now, if you injected amphetamine and got psychotic for the third time, then we might have a case to put part of the blame on you, after all, you should have understood that it might happen, and thus decided not to inject this time, but in general, it's not your fault if it happens otherwise.
It is true that we're all broken in some way or ways. What determines insanity in a legal sense, then, is not that but whether that defect adds up to something severe enough. It's a pretty tall order, but once you're above it, you really shouldn't be punished but get care for your condition.
It is true that we're all broken in some way or ways. What determines insanity in a legal sense, then, is not that but whether that defect adds up to something severe enough. It's a pretty tall order, but once you're above it, you really shouldn't be punished but get care for your condition.
Punishment per se is pointless for 99.9% of the adult population, though, no matter where on that spectrum you fall. It doesn't change behavior: look at recivitism rates. It doesn't atone for the crime: murder victims are still dead. Now, pragmatic solutions (i.e., "this person's mind is damaged, or otherwise works in a way that leads him to kill others, therefore this person is defective beyond our current ability to repair and should be consigned to the scrap heap lest he continue to be a danger") at least make logical sense. But as far as punishment for the sake of "justice"? All that does is allow a segment of the population to glut their sadism fantasies. So if treatment works for some things, it should be prescribed regardless of an arbitrary determination of "sane" or "not." If treatment doesn't work, pragmatic threat potential reduction is all we're left with that has any real use.
Sure punishment works. There are always some who try to paint it as ineffective. However, if we do look at recidivism rates, they are actually not that bad, particularly not in the sexual crimes area. As for what philosophy of justice we should follow, well, there are currently a few differing schools of thought.
However, if we do look at recidivism rates, they are actually not that bad, particularly not in the sexual crimes area.
Well, in the U.S., a day in prison for a "sex offense" is in essence a life sentence because of Meagan's Law and so on, so of course recivitism is low if the perp is never actually released from his ongoing term.
I have to admit I don't really grok the whole "not guilty by reason of insanity." I mean, sanity isn't a binary thing; it's a spectrum. EVERYONE is "insane" to some extent. We're all walking around with meat-computers in our heads, dictating our actions, that may be more or less broken or erratic in various areas or types of processing activity.
Here in the US it varies from State to State which test is used to determine culpability. For the most part they do work within the bounds of examining the place on the range that the defendant fits, and then look to culpablility based on the understanding of their actions.
The tests used by the courts vary from the very permissive Durham test that simply asks if the crime was a product of the mental illness, to the M'Naughten test which asks if the defendant was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong, to the MPC test where a defendant is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.
The last one is the most commonly used one, although a few states still use the M'Naughten test as well.
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However, if we do look at recidivism rates, they are actually not that bad, particularly not in the sexual crimes area.Well, in the U.S., a day in prison for a "sex offense" is in essence a life sentence because of Meagan's Law and so on, so of course recivitism is low if the perp is never actually released from his ongoing term.
You might want to look at other countries then, the people in the US are not that different a breed that numbers wouldn't be comparable.
Although i have seen mention of the fact that he played WoW in a few articles, i never once saw it implied that it in any way motivated him or was connected to the killings.
The first person shooters now...i seriously doubt they motivated him to do anything either. They might have helped him live out a sick jolly or two in his mind but other than that i don't see them being to blame.
WoW was just a shelter from the real world. He didnt have many friends and therefore made friends in game. He said that he dreamed of playing wow for one year longer. But I dont think wow is to blame for his crazy ideas. Call of Duty is pretty damn bloody at some points and the 2nd had a massacre were you played the villan (actually good guy undercover, you can choose to shoot or not).
Ah, he's a freemason? Well, that cinches it. It's obvious his freemasonry ties are the direct reason for murdering 77 people. =)
Ah, he's a freemason? Well, that cinches it. It's obvious his freemasonry ties are the direct reason for murdering 77 people. =)
I have a feeling he is a lot of things/a member of many organizations... the vast majority in his head, though.