Advocates of gun control should take note of recent developments in Norway, but won’t: On Wednesday evening, a convert to Islam in the city of Kongsberg, southwest of Oslo, began shooting at random people with a bow and arrow. Police confronted him, but police in Norway are unarmed, so they had to retreat when he began firing arrows at them. He was only apprehended 35 minutes later, after he had murdered five people. The lessons for foes of the Second Amendment should be obvious, and those aren’t the only lessons of this grisly incident.
The attacker was a Danish citizen and convert to Islam named Espen Andersen Bråthen. And he hadn’t embraced that religion of peace and tolerance that non-Muslim politicians in the West keep telling us about. According to the UK’s Sun, “Police said the Danish man suspected of the attack is a Muslim convert who was previously flagged as having been radicalized.” Chief of Police Ole Bredrup Sæverud stated that “there has previously been worrying information about this man linked to his radicalisation which the police have followed up… but in 2021, we have not received any warnings about him.”
So the police knew that Espen Andersen Bråthen could be dangerous, but they hadn’t received any reports about him lately, and so he was free and unsupervised to the extent that he was able to murder five people. It would be unrealistic to expect Norwegian police to be shadowing every dangerous person who may at some point commit a crime, but Bråthen does appear to be one who warranted a bit more attention than he received. According to the Washington Post, “Norwegian media reported that a court had granted a restraining order last year for the alleged attacker to stay away from two of his family members for six months after he threatened to kill one of them.”
Despite all this, the Sun claimed that Bråthen’s motive was “unknown,” and the Post noted that “the police attorney said psychiatric experts would assess him on Thursday.”
Maybe he is insane, but there is a long history of authorities in the West declaring that people who are obviously jihadis are simply mentally ill. In the real world, there is extremely strong evidence of what Bråthen’s motive was. He is a convert to a religion that reveres as holy a book that tells believers to “kill them,” that is, unbelievers, “wherever you find them” (Qur’an 2:191; 4:89; cf. 9:5). This applies to family members as well, for the same book says: “O you who believe, do not choose your fathers or your brothers for friends if they take pleasure in disbelief rather than faith. Whoever among you takes them for friends, such people are wrongdoers” (Qur’an 9:23). It depicts the patriarch Abraham as telling his unbelieving father that “there has arisen between us and you hostility and hatred forever, until you believe in Allah alone.” (Qur’an 60:4)
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If Espen Andersen Bråthen has been “radicalized,” he may have come in contact with publications of the Islamic State (ISIS), which in 2014 issued this call to Muslims in Western countries:
You must strike the soldiers, patrons, and troops of the tawaghit [rebels against Allah]. Strike their police, security, and intelligence members, as well as their treacherous agents. Destroy their beds. Embitter their lives for them and busy them with themselves. If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be….If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.
Bows and arrows would do as well.
But to explore possibilities such as these would be to transgress against a key dogma of the Leftist political and media elites: As Hillary Clinton put it back in 2015, “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” It’s likely that Norwegian police weren’t placing much emphasis on keeping track of Espen Andersen Bråthen because they subscribe to that dogma, and didn’t want to appear “Islamophobic.” They also don’t want to get into a position where their actions may suggest that inundating their country with Muslim migrants wasn’t a capital idea. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has also stated as part of its strategy in the West that it will launch so many plots that ultimately Western authorities can’t keep track of them all, and collapse from overextension. That Bråthen was loose to kill in Norway despite having come to police attention is an indication that this strategy is working.
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