The Norway massacre

I'll leave it to the reader to get their own information, but I'm going to quote an Ace of Spades commenter:

Not buying this.Something ain't right.

I tend to agree, based on what I've heard so far. The news is saying that the gunman had a machine pistol (some say automatic rifle and a handgun) ... that's a relatively specific description (at least for the uninformed media) and it sends red flags up for me.

Machine pistols (with exceptions) are sort of a training-intensive thing, requiring lots of training and practice to become proficient. That means lots of rounds of full-auto practice. A machine pistol, I imagine, would be the absolute worst spray-n-pray weapon around, as far as effectiveness. and given the firearms laws in Norway, it doesn't seem likely he'd be able to train that much. So unless the shooter has some military or police experience in his background, I'd tend to call bullshit.

Also consider that there are few (if any) machine pistols that have a cyclic rate under 1000 rpm. So if we assume he has 30 rd mags, and assume a reload time of, say ... 3 seconds to be generous, then that means for him to have been an active shooter for 90 minutes, he'd have had to have ...

let's see 30/1000 * 60 = time [in seconds] required to fire a whole magazine, plus 3, equals time to exhaust and reload; 90 min * 60sec/min = # of secs available to fire, divided by what we got in the first calculation equals # of mags he'd need, which is ....

1125 ... do you realize how heavy 1125 loaded mags are?!

So ... until we know more specifically exactly what the weapon used was, it's hard to imagine how this was done.

But the bottom line is that someone intent on violence brought an illegal weapon to a place where folks didn't think anyone would want to harm them, and reaped the expected whirlwind.

pm