Yet another nut shoots up a school

[Jon Miller]

They are known for their drug smuggling/etc here as well. In many areas they aren't the worse group though. I think that they were more trouble 20-40 years ago.

JM

[Meticulous Man]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/global/article4812776.ece

From Times Online
September 23, 2008
Commentary: it is time the Finns looked hard and close at their kids
Roger Boyes

The youth of Finland seems to be living on a short fuse. Only ten months after the Jokela school shooting — eight dead that time — there is again blood in the corridors and classrooms of a college in this apparently placid and consensus-loving country.

Early indications are that the latest assault was a bid for similar global notoriety. The Jokela slaughter last November stunned Finland and placed the killer, Pekka-Erik Auvinen, on the growing roster of desperate male teenagers ready to release their frustrations with a gun. Like Jokela, the latest shooter carefully planned the attack: from the timing, soon after the start of the academic year, to the YouTube manifesto, it was an act of theatre.

Auvinen’s YouTube message was a rambling Nietzschean tirade together with some clumsy attempts to demonstrate his shooting skills. No matter — before it was taken down it was viewed by thousands. Something similar happened in the case of the Kauhajoki killer. Sad to say, he had been motivated by no more than a desire for internet celebrity.

School massacres feed off each other, and plainly the youth who blasted his schoolmates learned from Auvinen; Auvinen in turn had been in touch with a would-be American shooter.
Related Links

* 10 dead in shooting spree at Finnish college

* Dear Finns, don't you think a mass murder deserves debate?

* YouTube killer leaves a grieving nation in shock

Yet at the risk of howls of displeasure from Finnish readers — who raged at my commentary on Jokela — it has to be said that there is something disturbing going on in their proud, self-regulating Nordic culture. After not one, but two massacres in a year, it is time that the Finns looked hard and close at their children.

After Jokela — an average school in Tuusala, an average dormitory suburb of the Finnish capital — my argument was that the Finns were letting down their young generation, allowing them to slip into a kind of psychological isolation. In small-town Finland — with nothing much to do except hang around in cliques forged in school, with the days shortening, with parents absent and the geographical distance between the homes of classmates unusually long — traditional friendship was slipping away and being replaced by social networking sites. Although all Finnish schools have psychiatrists, they are overworked. Teachers geared to ensuring exam results are failing to spot depression. And in a society with a hunting tradition, guns are readilly available.

Well, young Finnish readers deemed this to be a parade of stereotypes. There was, they said, nothing specifically Finnish about the Jokela tragedy. If anything it was an American import, or a disease easily spread by the internet and video-game makers.

In short, there was nothing much to be done — apart from mourn the pupils and teachers caught in the sights of a mentally deranged killer.

Now, it has happened again. Time, surely, for the Finns to ask themselves a few questions. Or would that be unpatriotic, un-Finnish, rocking the boat?

After Jokela, I was invited to a Finnish school to help to dispose of my prejudices. Situated on the outskirts of Helsinki, it was indeed an impressive place. Great effort was being invested in integrating immigrants, helping them to come up to scratch in Finnish. The reason why Finnish schools always do so well in international school league tables is that they try so hard to bring up class averages. Nobody is left behind. In one class a very bright Russian immigrant teased his native-born Finnish ice-hockey obsessed mate and declared: “Jokela couldn’t happen here — he would have talked over his problems with friends.”

But later I visited a special, almost quarantined, part of the school, a block that sought to bring drop-outs back into the system. It was well intentioned. The teenagers were given free breakfasts and fresh coffee to get them out of bed. They had classes when they wanted but mainly played cards and listened to music. They were plainly an embarrassment to many teachers, part of a government scheme that had been hatched before Jokela. The truth is that they were there to improve the statistics of the education system. The kids, nice but withdrawn, needed a different kind of help. Other children in school regarded them as freaks.

No, they betrayed no signs of latent violence: they were not reaching for their guns. But they had been set aside by a society still striving for a kind of perfection, a social democratic utopia. The Jokela killer was not spotted because, said his class teacher, he got good marks; interest in him stopped at that point. Perhaps the Kauhajoli killer was also being earmarked by the teachers in his catering college as a promising restaurant manager.

[Pekka]

Says a lot about the people writing back to the author of that article, stereotype or not, it's pretty much true. But we rather stick our heads in the sand and blame it was the movies.

I think it is fairly disturbing that the police says he had been planning this ever since 2002. Holy cow...

[Pekka]

It's kind of frustrating. We seem to be pointing everywhere except the root causes or basically reality.

Internet of course made him do it, and today's youth is weak. They are weak so when they encounter setbacks, they resort into gun play.

I guess we could write this to the journal of experimental psychology, co-author it by all Finns. We know it's true. It was the internet. Also, they're weak. Well, keep calling them week pussies, and you know what happens next, some other short fuse kid who is in pain and agony yet again sees the proof of the idiocy of our society, sees how he still has no relief because the real issues won't be addressed. Keep calling them pussies, they'll just get more motivation to do it again. We forget common sensical responses, I mean it's not exactly normal to go on a mass murdering rampage if you "get upset" or if life kicks you in the nuts. It is not a response by a young that is weak and didn't win in the lottery and thus takes it on the world. Now THAT would be scary. IMagine people doing this when they get upset, as in this is kind of normal behaviour. Fortunately it isn't so.

Plus, he planned it from 2002, does it look like he was upset and acted upon it? Nope. He was a cold blooded killer, and the reasons are to be found elsewhere than the internet or music.

[Tattila the Hun]

2002, eh? Must've been GTA III, then.

I wonder if silence would work... Nobody would talk about the psycho, no media-frenzy, no reason for would-be gunman to be one.

[Supr49er]

What are the gun laws in Finland? Is it easy to get them?

How many people/households have guns?

[Jeje2]

Originally posted by Supr49er
What are the gun laws in Finland? Is it easy to get them?

How many people/households have guns?

I don't know the numbers, but here comes...

There are a lot of guns in Finland, but most of them are hunting guns. (It's a popular sport and owners quite commonly have several guns)

Guns must be licenced in Finland and obviously it's quite easy to get a license as long as you don't have previous crimanal record.

[Supr49er]

Jeje2; So mostly rifles, not handguns?

[Pekka]

Well, according to the world standards, our regulations are strict.

[Jeje2]

Found little info: 1,62 million registered guns (5+million inhabitants) with ca. 650 000 registered gun owners. (+ some unregistered...) Ca. 60% of the registered guns are registered for hunting.
Found here the facts (In Finnish unfortunately)

[Meticulous Man]

OMG les révélations commencent! A Finnish TV channel has interviewed a person who claims to have known the shooter and that the latter planned the shooting in coordination with the previous madman... Too far-fetched to be true?

http://www.nelonen.fi/videot/default.asp?video=5500&c=1

[Pekka]

Yeah, heard about this too a bit earlier.

Who knows. Maybe. Can you believe the discipline they had if it's true? Maybe this guy went with it earlier than he wanted because the cops got to him that previous day so maybe he figured he should do it ASAP. Who knows, maybe he woudl have done it the same day the previous one did.

Anyways, this girl, if this story is true, should be in deep trouble. I also assume she is of age.

[Henrik]

Originally posted by Supr49er
What are the gun laws in Finland? Is it easy to get them?

How many people/households have guns?

According to swedish newspapers today finland has the third most guns per capita in the world, surpassed only by Yemen and the US. It's only the only country within the EU as far as I know where minors can get guns. As previously stated though most are hunting rifles

[Pekka]

Yes. And sure, minors can get guns as well. 15 years old is the age limit. But the control still isn't by any means very loose, as far as hand guns go. Huntings weapons? Tons of them.

But both of these guys were of age, so the age limit wouldn't have prevented anything. They also bought them legally, thus no problem there either.

Seems to me tha tno matter what, these guys woudl have pulled this one off, we can't stop them with laws or new policies. Some others? Perhaps, but not these two, who were determined, disciplined, waited for it and then acted upon their plans. You just can't stop that.

THe only place you can look for is mental health places, as in how to get these troubled minds help and support early enough and hope to find other ways to release that dark and strong stuff they have inside of them. So they won't decide to kill. Once that decision is made, and they really go for it, there's nothing you can do to stop it really, it'll go down one way or the other. So to prevent that, you need to go further than gun laws. And even then, no system is 100% fail proof.

[Jeje2]

Originally posted by Henrik


According to swedish newspapers today finland has the third most guns per capita in the world, surpassed only by Yemen and the US. It's only the only country within the EU as far as I know where minors can get guns. As previously stated though most are hunting rifles

Nope - it is based on a false reading of statistics. After Jokela the media found these statistics. They were based on a Swiss statistics from 2007 which was actually based on years old data that was estimated more than double in the upper end. (Finland corrected this in August of 2007 to them, but ...)

You know the saying Lie, monstrous lie, statistics - well this is a case of that.

Finlad is ca 7-9 on the list with guns per capita together with Canada, France, Germany and Sweden.

All this is taken from the same Finnish article I earlier citated.

The article concludes in the end that now matter how many guns there really are - it's obviously too many.