I suppose when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. And before the ever-increasing death toll from the horror unfolding in Oslo and on Utoya had worked its way up out of single digits, the usual suspects (warning: Malkin and Geller links) wasted no time in politicizing the massacre, and pulled out their trusty "jihadi terrorist" hammer. Even by evening, as evidence continued to mount that this was an act of domestic right-wing terrorism, Laura Ingraham, guest hosting The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News, was glibly describing the attack as "the work, once again, of Muslim extremists." (h/t to Cullen Milligan's diary)
But as facts about Anders Behring Breivik, the man Norwegian police had taken into custody on Utoya, began to emerge, did the glaring falseness of their initial assumptions, coupled with Breivik's anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-multicultural views, inspire even the slightest moment of sober reflection at the rightward end of the blogosphere at indications that Breivik might be, at least in some key ways, one of their own?
Not exactly.
Instead, some began to pick up another favorite hammer, one well-worn at times of incomprehensible gun violence: their unshakable assumption that the world would be a much safer place if everybody, everywhere, was packing heat.
Musings on such whackery follow below the fold.
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