Lizzie, even though you are probably correct that this person is irredeemable, I still think that the difference between Us and Them is importsnt when more than two deep breaths divide the original act and response. If you had been there after 76 and you prevented a 77th, you'd have deserved a medal. When we have a Brevik under physical control, I think we need to NOT behave like him or like the sods who cut off Victor Jara's hands to humiliate him before killing him outright. Should he see the light of day outside? Not in a thousand years. Should anything except the killing have been allowed in testimony in court? Of course not. Should we make him a martyr to those benighted souls who think what he did was excusable? I think the evidence of the millennia of war over competing mythologies, still in full swing in Syria and the greater middle east (much of it perpetrated by my own government), all over Africa, more subtly in China, all suggest not. If we have the music, we have the only long term power over the Joe McCarthys with guns. The bastards are rightly more afraid of the music and art than of guns. I am NOT above revenge, and I did not suffer a personal loss in Brevik's rampage, but we all lost people to Hiitler and to Pinochet. When we have the time, we do well to keep the state killing to a minimum.
Carter