What can one say? My heart goes out to the families of the victims from Jokela School in Tuusala. I actually missed the earlier reports of this multiple murder as we had a family crisis of our own in progress at the time - our cat was stuck up a tree for a day and two nights. Naturally, this paled into insignificance as the details of the tragic situation unfolded.
It is hard to believe that in Finland, with a population no bigger than a major European city, that such a thing can happen. I applaud the Head Mistress for her fatal bravery in trying to calm the gunman (boy). I applaud the police for not simply taking out the gunman as he fired on them - but I think perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here. I have no wish at all to point fingers at anyone in this editorial, but again I think there are many valuable lessons to be learned from this tragedy.
According to the BBC News website "Police in Finland have found a suicide note written by an 18-year-old student shortly before he went on a gun rampage at his school and killed eight people. 'Pekka-Eric Auvinen said goodbye to his family and explained his hatred towards society', the police said. Auvinen gave a warning of the shooting in a video posted on the Internet."
Indeed, this warning was on the Internet for many days before the killing. The warning included even the projected date of the killing, but no systems were in place to alert the necessary authorities to the danger. Suitable software could have noticed the post-dated time frame, noticed words like 'massacre' and alerted a human to view the content. Suitable legislation would have required the administrators to contact Interpol or Europol, and set some kind of follow-up in motion. We can learn so much and be better prepared in the future.
There is no way we can completely protect against this kind of thing from happening, especially if a killer is prepared to swap his life for the kill, but this kind of senseless killing is not the result of a balanced mind, and the unbalanced mind is often happy to 'go public' before the event, and therefore provide us with a little time to take preventative action.
The Equalizer
The Equalizer - that's how a well-known brand of gun was advertised in the Wild West, a place where a man walking around without a gun might as well have been walking around in his underpants. The Equalizer - and this is where a gun becomes a problem - where the little guy can become as big as the big guy - where the put-down can get his revenge. The pro-gun lobby in the United States say that it is not guns that kill people, it is only the people pulling the trigger, but what if the person in question cannot find a trigger to pull, what if guns were simply just not available? Would that same person be able to pull out a knife and do the job that way? Would that same person be able to pick up a heavy object and bludgeon his target to death? I think that in most cases the answer would be 'no'. In this case, the gun was legally owned by an 18-year-old who obtained a license simply because he had never been caught doing anything illegal, and because he had visited a gun club a few times. Is this enough? I think not. More stringent rules should be put into place as regards the psychological state of gun-license applicants.