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Nov. 15, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:51
2258 Saving Us from Shooters

How well did the police protect people from James Holmes, the Aurora shooter, and Norway Shooter Anders Breivik?

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Hi everybody, it's Steph from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So one of the questions I get asked a lot is how in a free society, in a stateless society, do we protect ourselves from crazy nuts with flamethrowers and acid bombs and shooters and so on?
And always embedded in that question is the implicit premise that somehow we are being protected from these lunatics already.
So I'm going to give you two cases here that argues against that and then give you a few ideas as to how it can be solved.
So you probably remember Anders Breivik.
He was the Norwegian nutjob who shot up 77 people and wounded like 280 others last summer.
And some information has come out about His childhood, that is important.
This is not to say he's not an evil guy who killed a bunch of people.
He is.
But cause is important.
You can investigate the causes of cancer without being pro-cancer.
And, in fact, you're really only anti-cancer if you are investigating the causes.
So, his father, who became a diplomat, married and then divorced his mother when he was about a year old.
His father desperately tried to get custody of little Anders, but couldn't.
I mean, of course, there's a very pro-mom bias in the courts as a whole.
But the mom was a complete nutjob and sounds pretty stone evil.
I mean, she felt that the child was evil and dangerous even before he was born because he was kicking in her belly so much.
When she breastfed him, she felt that her son was, quote, aggressive, hyperactive, and clingy.
By the time he was four, she sexualized him.
I don't know what that means exactly.
Can't really find much of a definition.
Certainly she exposed him to sexual encounters.
She used incredibly sexual language around him.
She hit him and frequently told him That she wished he were dead.
This is at the age of four and probably earlier.
She saw him as an adult violent person, though he was only a small boy.
She was afraid that he would assault people.
She was always preoccupied with this.
It's amazing, eh, that the mother's prophecy so often becomes the child's personality.
The family's neighbors became worried about her inappropriate sexual behavior.
During the police investigation, the neighbors said they had been shocked by the mother's highly sexualized language.
There was a lot of fighting in the apartment and they remembered sexual activity taking place while the children We're in there.
The report described the mother as, quote, a woman with an extremely difficult upbringing, borderline personality structure, and all-encompassing, if only partially visible depression, who projects her primitive, aggressive, and sexual fantasies onto him, Breivik, the child.
The psychologist reported that the mother would frequently tell her child she wished he would die.
She shifts very quickly between speaking to him with a sugary voice and openly expressing a death wish.
They wrote.
Now, after Breivik was arrested, he actually gave himself up after shooting all these people.
When he was being interrogated at the police station, he would veer or he veered between Expressing concern for his victims and then coldly wishing that he had killed more of them.
You see this is the mother, the mother alter ego, switching back and forth, this sugary solicitude followed by these murderous statements.
So it's a direct mirror of what he experienced as an infant and as a little boy.
When the mother hit him, the four-year-old would taunt her that the blows did not hurt.
Smiling in a way she found condescending, inappropriate, and derisive.
The mother admitted to a psychiatric ward the day after her son killed 77 people in his bomb-and-gum rampage in July 2011, and she has been excused from testifying in the trial due to health grounds, and she's refused to give permission for the psychologist to examine the family in 1983 and 1984 to give evidence, which is, again, just more horror.
After Breivik's father lost a child custody case with the mother, social workers recommended that the boy still be removed from his mother to prevent, quote, more severe psychopathology from developing, but they were ignored.
So, a few clues, really, there.
A mother who...
Wish her son dead, who sexualized him, who had...
Now imagine the kind of guys who are gonna come in to a mom's apartment and have sex with her while the children are in the apartment.
Listening, watching, who knows.
Imagine the kind of quality of these men.
These are sexual predators and deviates, perverts, and probably pedophiles of the first order.
So you have a little boy around with all of these unbelievably trashy and nasty men around.
It seems to me highly likely that he would have been raped or abused, sexually abused in some manner.
Then, of course, he grows up and he's very concerned about foreigners entering his pure country.
You understand this is just a projection of the sexual trauma, the lack of capacity to keep his physical boundaries.
He grows up then with an obsession about keeping the...
Norwegian boundaries pure and keeping foreigners out and dangerous people out and so on.
This is quite often how this stuff works.
This is not reasoned philosophical positions but defense for early childhood trauma.
Let's move on to exhibit B, the Colorado shooter.
You probably remember him.
July this year, 2012, James Holmes.
He murdered 12 people and wounded 58 at the Batman shooting.
So, again, we've said the government is necessary to protect us from all these criminals, you see, and what happened?
Well, in June of 2010, of course, he enters the University of Colorado School of Medicine's neuroscience program as a doctoral candidate, and he had conversations with classmates, with a classmate about wanting to kill people in March of 2012, and that he would do it, he would go and murder everyone when his life was over.
This is according to attorneys for the state.
That alleged conversation would have occurred at roughly the same time that Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said Holmes began receiving a high volume of deliveries at his home and at the university.
Authorities have not said what these packages contained, but they said he ordered thousands of rounds of ammunition on the internet.
Prosecutors said Holmes left the neuroscientific program in June of 2012 after also making unspecified threats to a professor and failing his year-end final.
So, when my life's over, I'm going to go kill all these people.
I'm ordering all this ammunition.
I'm ordering massive amounts of guns.
Oh, I've just flanked out of my course.
My life is now over.
What do you think is going to happen next?
April 2012, he starts purchasing ammo online.
Over the next four months, he buys 6,000 rounds of ammo and 350 shells for a 12-gauge shotgun.
He purchased a Glock pistol, May 2012, a shotgun, purchases June 2012, purchases an AR-15 assault rifle.
In his profile on a dating website, Holmes writes, will you visit me in prison?
June 2012, he inquires about membership at a gun range outside Denver.
So he calls, there's nobody there, leave the message, and the owner of the gun range calls back.
He listens to James Holmes' outgoing message and completely freaks out.
It's guttural, it's horrible, it's strange, it's demonic.
And he said to his staff, listen, if this guy comes by, do not let him join the club.
Do not let him have a weapon.
And in June, he files paperwork to withdraw from his program, giving no reason.
A few days after, he takes an oral exam, in which he reportedly does poorly.
In early June, Holmes told his psychiatrist that he had recently purchased an assault rifle.
She was so disturbed that she broke confidentiality, which is no small matter, and contacted the university's threat assessment team to warn them.
The team never had a formal meeting and never intervened.
His psychiatrist also contacted the university police.
Experts report that patients rarely contain all of their violent thoughts during therapy.
It spills out into the, quote, July 2012, Holmes buys an urban assault vest, a triple pistol magazine, and an M16 magazine pouch, and a knife.
He pays for two-day shipping.
It's in a hurry.
He also purchases a second Glock pistol, and then, of course, he engages in mass murder.
And it turns out, according to reports, a package that was addressed to his psychiatrist at the University of Colorado is discovered in the mailroom.
Hmm, who knows what the story is here?
I mean, was it delivered and then they just said, oh crap, we're liable now, so let's just pretend we couldn't find it.
And reportedly it contains detailed plans for the shooting, includes drawings of a gunman and his victims, and was mailed a week before the massacre.
Are you telling me that all conceivable human ingenuity, financial and legal motives in a free society could not possibly find any pattern here, could not possibly find any problems with these situations?
Of course they could.
People who have actual incentive, who are liable, like the guy who runs the gun range is like, boom, this guy's a nut job, don't let him near any weapons.
But everybody else, I mean, The social workers for Breivik, the people that they recommended to, the judges who denied the custody for the father, are they liable for anything?
Of course not.
Of course not.
The state is liable for nothing.
Nothing.
The psychiatrist reports and the gun owners reports because they have liability.
But nobody else has any liability.
And of course, if the university is found to be liable, it'll just come out of the general fund.
Nobody's home gets taken.
I mean, there's no...
Right?
So you need to have a system where people are liable.
So if you buy a bunch of insurance for dangerous things like this, let's say there are...
50 people who might, sorry, 10 people who might get killed, they get 5 million bucks a piece.
You got 50 million dollars right there that you can spend up to almost 50 million dollars to prevent these kinds of things.
What does that mean?
Does that mean going to the mom who's got this psychotic kid and offering her money to give up her custody rights?
It's still a good deal once you know what these patterns are and what the risks are down the road.
There's lots and lots of different ways that you can make sure that you deal with prevention rather than That you intervene early, that you give people reduced rates on school fees, you give people reduced rates on insurance for their children if they take parenting courses and pass them and whatever, right?
Just give people financial incentives to protect others and to improve their parenting.
There's none of that in the system right now.
I mean, if I put a product out there, like I make aspirin or some pill or whatever, I put something out there that gets people killed, I'm liable.
But if you're a parent who raises one of these dangerous monsters, nobody even seems to want to assign responsibility for you, because remember, thou shalt honor thy mother thy father, and parents never have any responsibility for anything.
If I have a bull mastiff and I beat it senseless every day, and then it gets out of my yard and goes and chews someone's leg up, I'm liable for that.
It's my dog, I've damaged the dog, and the dog is now out in society doing these terrible things.
Why would it be any different for parents?
Of course.
I mean, parents and people who aren't going to be good for the sake of being good are going to be good because of incentives.
Basic principle of economics.
People respond to incentives.
What incentives are there?
What legal liability is there for people who create these monsters through this endless abuse?
People who are charged with the professional duty to intervene and protect people from these, they don't protect.
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