A second school massacre in 10 months points to a wider malaise within Finnish society, writes Jamie Smythin Kauhajoki
WHEN MATTI Saari walked into his classroom at Kauhajoki catering college on Tuesday morning he was supposed to be sitting his marketing exam with his fellow students.
Instead, at 10.54am the 22-year-old trainee chef took out his treasured Walther .22 calibre automatic pistol and went on a shooting rampage that claimed the lives of nine students and his teacher. He later doused the victims with flammable liquid and set them on fire, burning the bodies to such an extent that the police took days to identify them from dental records.
Three of his classmates escaped the carnage by clambering out of windows and swimming across a river at the back of the college. The traumatised survivors later told police that while he was shooting, Saari told them how he was "enjoying" his killing spree.
For Finns this is the second time in 10 months they have turned on their television sets to see pictures of a school being cordoned off by police, and students being carried out in body bags.
Last November, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot dead seven of his fellow students and a teacher on a shooting spree at Jokela high school in southern Finland.
This week's shooting in the normally sleepy town of Kauhajoki in western Finland, which has just 15,000 residents, closely mimicked last year's massacre. Saari posted videos of himself on YouTube before he attacked. He left messages for the police at his flat, which overlooked the college. And, like the Jokela killer, he was bullied at school. Both young men wore black clothes, had slick blond hair and killed themselves following the attacks.
The following day the front page of Finland's biggest newspaper, the Helsinki Sanomat was dominated by a single question: "Why?" it asked its readers. Talk-show hosts, politicians and the residents of Kauhajoki are all asking themselves the same question.
Was it a freak coincidence or is there something fatalistic in the Finnish psyche or culture that makes the country more prone to this type of school massacre?
"I can't really answer that," says Kauhajoki's mayor, Antti Rantakokko, who has spent the last four days trying to reassure the townsfolk and console the victims' families. "I think it is definitely a copycat case and the internet may have had a role to play. There should also be tighter controls on guns, particularly these types of automatic handguns."
FINLAND'S GUN CULTURE has become a huge focus of criticism since the shooting. Saari listed "guns, sex, computers and beer" as his hobbies on his internet web profile. He was obsessed with his Walther automatic pistol, which he bought in the same shop as the Jokela shooter, Pekka-Eric Auvinen. He videoed himself shooting his pistol at the local shooting range in Kauhajoki and posted the clip on YouTube the Friday before the attack.
"He came to the shooting range at least three times, that's what I've heard, but he was not a member of the club. Once he was caught practising by himself, shooting at cans. We gave him proper targets to shoot at, but he only shot a few times and left," says Terho Niemela, chairman of the Kauhajoki gun club, which is located a few miles from the town.
Shooting clubs are extremely popular in Finland, in much the same way as golf clubs are popular in Ireland. Sports shooting and hunting are important cultural traditions and gun ownership is the third highest in the world per capita - there are 1.6 million guns for just 5.3 million Finns - while the laws regulating gun ownership are extremely lax by European standards.
It is legal for 15-year-olds to buy guns if they can obtain parental permission and automatic pistols of the type used in the Kauhajoki and Jokela massacres are freely available in many high street gun shops. Government promises to tighten the rules after last year's Jokela shooting have so far come to naught against a powerful hunting lobby.
After meeting children in Kauhajoki this week, Finnish prime minister Matti Vanhanen again announced that gun ownership rules would be tightened. He wants to make it more difficult for people to buy pistols and make it easier for police to access details on the mental health of the applicant for a gun licence. He also wants to force some gun owners to store their weapons at properly licensed gun clubs rather than in their own homes. But gun lobbyists have already labelled the plan a gross over-reaction.
"I have answered so many phone calls from worried hunters and sports shooters this week who fear their culture is under threat," says Runo Kurko, president of the National Rifle Association. "We have been able to hunt freely for 500 years and there are 340,000 hunters. These incidents are caused by young guys with mental health problems, not the fact of owning guns."
Most analysts expect the gun laws will be tightened this time, and possibly as early as spring 2009. But there is also a growing belief among sociologists that the two recent school shootings in Finland point to a wider malaise within Finnish society, which suffers some of the highest suicide and homicide rates within the EU.
Recent World Health Organisation statistics show the number of people who die every year as a result of intentional violence in Finland is 2.19 per 100,000, which is double the rate in Sweden (1.02) and almost triple the Irish figure (0.76).
European Commission statistics published in 2006 also show 29.4 people per 100,000 take their own lives in Finland every year, double the Irish suicide rate, which stands at 14.1 people per 100,000.
"One of the problems is that Finnish society has developed extremely rapidly," says Matti Rimpela of the National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health in Finland. "Family structures have broken down, with parents often having to move to find work, while Finnish women left the home to work in the 1950s. This means we don't have the same family structures as in Ireland and so our welfare system has to be strong."
A SHIFT OF emphasis in the 1980s from child welfare towards more care for an ageing population, combined with cutbacks forced by a severe recession in the early 1990s, has left the system unable to cope. Finnish boys and men generally do not communicate or share their feelings effectively, says Rimpela, who believes the government now needs to make a big effort to rebuild child welfare programmes to address the problem.
Jukka Helin, a navy chaplain dispatched to Kauhajoki this week to offer spiritual advice to the victims' families, says the reserved, often shy, Finnish character, the breakdown in traditional family supports and the internet may all be causal factors in the recent shootings.
"If you think about the nature of a Finn, you talk about a nation where people speak two different languages but remain silent. In Finland the extended family does not exist like it did and some people replace that with the internet." He adds that the darkness in so-called "twilight countries" in the north, such as Finland and Canada, could also play a role.
The obvious "copycat" nature of the Kauhajoki and Jokela massacres are also shining a light onto young Finns' passion for the internet. There are mounting calls for greater monitoring of websites such as YouTube and the popular social networking site IRC-Gallery, which were both used by Saari to post videos of him shooting his handgun.
"There could be some complex internet subcultures at play in these incidents," says Janne Kivivuori, research director at the National Research Institute of Legal Policy.
In Kauhajoki this week most stunned locals spoke of their disbelief that their small God-fearing town could harbour a killer capable of this type of destruction. But some of the crisis workers, officials and grief workers sent to the town in the aftermath of the attack to help had also been in Jokela.
"We didn't expect this but you can't say that this will never happen again," says Erik Haggman, senior adviser at the state provincial social welfare office. "Our big problem is how to touch the 'group zeros' or 'walking bombs' - the young people that aren't being reached by counselling services, especially the boys. Girls tend to be more social."
In Finland, many more questions remain than answers. But at least the debate has started.