Finland said it would toughen its gun laws after Tuesday’s school massacre, as police — who questioned but released the killer a day before the shooting — landed in the hot seat.
Culinary arts student Matti Juhani Saari (22) burst into his classroom at a vocational school in the south-western town of Kauhajoki on Tuesday morning, shooting dead eight female and one male classmate and a male teacher, before setting the building on fire and fatally shooting himself.
Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, who ordered flags across Finland to fly at half-mast and declared Wednesday a national day of mourning, travelled to the small town, about 360km from Helsinki, to meet local officials and family members of the massacre victims.
Upon arrival on Wednesday morning, Vanhanen reiterated that the Nordic country’s until-now lenient gun laws would be significantly tightened following the second massacre at a Finnish school in less than a year.
”We will take a decision regarding a new law in a few months. We have had a very long tradition” of gun ownership, he said.
Finland has one of the world’s highest gun ownership rates, ranking third behind the United States and Yemen, according to a study last year.
Vanhanen said the country was in the process of implementing a new European Union directive it had previously contested preventing 15-year-olds from possessing guns.
”Finland will raise [the age for gun ownership] from 15 to 18,” he said, before adding: ”But in this case it would not have [made a difference] because this guy was 22.”
In an eerily similar case, 18-year-old student Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot six students, a headmistress and a school nurse before killing himself in a school in Jokela, north of Helsinki on November 7 2007.
He, like Saari, had easily acquired a licence for his .22 calibre handgun, despite the fact that his obsession with violence was widely known.
Vanhanen on Wednesday said he was ”very critical” of the ease with which one can access firearms in Finland.
Inquiry
The prime minister also said an inquiry had been opened into why police failed to prevent Tuesday’s school shooting, even though they had questioned Saari the day before.
”There is an investigation regarding the last few days” before the shooting, Vanhanen said, without specifying who was conducting the probe.
Just hours after the massacre, Finland’s Interior Minister, Anne Holmlund, revealed that police had questioned Saari on Monday about a video posted on YouTube that showed him shooting his weapon at a firing range, but police had not deemed him enough of a threat to withdraw his gun licence.
”It appears the police reacted immediately and met this young man, but we don’t know what information they had and the reason why his licence was not withdrawn,” Vanhanen said.
Finnish media on Wednesday unanimously blamed the latest attack on the country’s lax weapons’ laws, internet violence, out-of-control individualism and even failures in the Finnish school system, which according to international assessments is the best in the developed world.
The country’s paper of reference, Helsingin Sanomat, for instance, asked whether ”the Finnish schools, which were cited as an example around the world until last autumn, are seeking excellence at the expense of the community?”.
”Have we forgotten about empathy in the education we offer our children?” it added.
The Swedish-language daily Hufvudstadsbladet, meanwhile, lamented that Finland ”no longer only stands out with its high levels of domestic violence … or its high-quality schools, but also as ranking among the top countries when it comes to school killings.”
A day after a black-clad Saari, wearing a ski mask, marched into a classroom and shot his terrified classmates trapped inside, the inhabitants of this usually sleepy town of 14 000 people were teetering between anger and dismay.
”Everything is good in Finland, the country has everything. So why?” asked Jari Huhtanen, a 45-year-old factory floor manager, when asked what he makes of the tragedy.
He noted that Finns were generally known to be reserved, sombre and tight-lipped, people ”who don’t laugh a lot and don’t have a lot of fun together”.
Lacking communication, isolated young people, inattentive parents and Finnish individualism were mentioned repeatedly by residents struggling to comprehend how such a tragedy could happen in the Nordic country, again.
Vanhanen appeared to agree.
”Strengthening the sense of community is the best way to prevent such shocking acts,” he said. — AFP
