I am confused: I expected it to be impossible for a single man - or even two men - to murder 80 others like this. Even given the use of firearms against the unarmed you would tihnk someone would have clubbed him over the head or something. Even simply throwing rocks could have posed a threat to him. Yet there is no record of him being injured.
This is why many, at least here in the U.S. including myself on occasion, refer to the general public as the "sheeple." Obviously, it's a play on words, combining "the People" from our founding documents with "sheep," connoting extreme passivity and inability to respond effectively to danger. The island was a youth retreat -- I don't know what age range, but I saw a report that mentioned one surviving witness is 15 years old. So ... teenagers. From left-leaning families. Norway probably doesn't have a huge violence problem anyway, and I have no doubt that good Social Democrats would disavow violence and raise their children in ways guaranteed to make them as isolated as possible from the reality that there is evil in the world.
So, when faced with the reality of a man shooting at them with a submachine gun, they panicked, and either froze or ran. Who knows if any of them were old enough to have had even a miniscule chance of prevailing if they had rushed him? Heck, I'm a veteran of Vietnam and I would be hesitant to rush a guy with an MP5 blazing away. Throw rocks? Only works if there are enough people working together that the rocks create a diversion allowing others to rush him from behind. Kids in the U.S. are starting to think along such lines now as a result of multiple school shootings, but Norway has never had such incidents.
You know how the human mind works: It hasn't happened here, therefore it can't happen here.
