It’s like winning a lottery to be born in Finland?

Museokatu, my home street today

These mentally unstable kids are looking for becoming popular and famous in no matter what and as long as they make it to the news. And the media follows. The shooting only took place today, but it already has a dedicated Wikipedia site online. According to the news, Matti Saari only received a permit for his handgun yesterday after being interviewed in person by the police. Over the past few weeks he had systematically uploaded shooting material and massacre warnings to Youtube and IRC gallery, Finland’s largest Internet community for teens and young adults (60% of the users are older than 18). In the IRC homepage there is a link to information pack for parents about the rules of the site – still, I bet most of the parents haven’t even heard about IRC.

This tragic incident has again reminded the nation about guns and the olk-skool gun laws: only the United States and Yemen have higher levels of gun ownership per inhabitant. And yet, Finland wants to paint a picture of a modern, safe country with flawless education system and uncorrupted democracy. According to the Finnish Ministry of the Interior there are currently 1.6 million legal firearms in Finland. The population is around 5.2 million so that adds up to 32 privately owned legal firearms per 100 civilians. And as if that wasn’t enough, many households also store guns brought back from the frontiers of the second world war:

There may be as few as 50,000 or as many as 500,000. The majority of the unregistered firearms are personal war booty Soviet or German firearms dating to WWII. (Wikipedia)

Why does a nation need that many guns? According to the national broadcasting company YLE only 60% of firearm permits are issued for hunting weapons. That makes 40% – 840 000 guns – to be used for other purposes. Both these kids had licenses for their guns and were just avid hobbyists. Dang! There is a big margin for other ones with similar interests.

The last year Jokela massacre began a discussion of what could and should be done to prevent further similar tragedies and now it will get louder again. Ironically, the official group that has been analysing the reasons and consequences of last year’s incident hasn’t even published their results yet. And the online forums are already burstign with the macho comments of “one idiot spoils everyone’s fun.” I would just change the laws now and get the handguns out asap.

So what is wrong with this country? What’s with all these Columbine copycats? I only moved back to Finland two months ago after spending 11 years abroad, so I am still rather outsider myself. However, world is very different from the times when I was at school in the 80′s. Traditionally Finland was a socialistic country, where school, health care and basic services were free and available to everyone. There was a general sense of being a part of society, which has radically changed since. Today’s Finland is no longer even trying to promote services for everyone, same thing that has happened to the whole world. Money rules. Every doctor wants to work in the well-paid private sector. People prefer paying for fast private services. Money doesn’t get spent to support families or preventing problems, but rather gets spent on fixing the mess afterwards. So, the money is spent to too late in the chain instead of preventing the problems in the first place. A good example is the increasing amount of kids that are taken to foster families or temporary shelters due to the abuse and problems in the family. The preventive work for supporting the families doesn’t get the cash, because preventive work does not show in the statistics. It prevents the problems

Single parents, low income households, people with mental problems, old people and people who are depending on social services are not media sexy and therefore not interesting for the politicians and decision makers. They are silent part of the nation, almost invisible. The society no longer looks after people; everything needs to be profitable. This week’s news was that Finland is no longer the least corrupted country in the world – now that political parties got caught of accepting money from businesses. Only naive people believe in common goals, justice or liberty. Everyone’s too busy trying to save themselves from the economic slowdown and the spiralling expenses. Schools, doctors, towns, cities, we all need to be profitable. Money needs to make more money.

What will happen tomorrow morning when the dust begins to settle? Internet, American violent culture and heavy metal music will be blamed, Jack Thompson will release a statement that links the shooting to GTA series (to get hassled less I would rather work as a meter maid than the PR person in Rockstar games), but I doubt that this business oriented culture of stress, overworking, greed and profit hunting will change radically in one night.

When my 60-year old mother Kaija saw today’s news, she immediately said that we are all responsible for this. First and foremost she blames that her generation brought forward the wrong values and we all get to pay for it. I don’t think it is her generation only, which cocked up – my generation bought the values and enhanced them. This is not a righteous world of flawless superheroes, justice isn’t for all and good guys don’t win. Hmm, this rant starts to sound somehow familiar. What if Rockstar Games has just managed to nail the time we live in right between the eyes?

Miksi taas? Why again?