November 7, 2007, 10:54 am
A Deadly School Shooting, This Time in Finland
By Mike Nizza
Tags: crime, education, violence
UPDATED, 12:15 p.m.
School shootings have become painfully familiar news here in the United States, but today it is happening far, far away, at a high school in southern Finland. The death toll reports started at one and are now up to at least eight, including five boys, two girls and one adult woman, according to a local official quoted by Reuters.
The news service is all over this story, from a teacher’s account of the shooter’s rampage that proceeded from classroom to classroom to a detailed description of a YouTube video posted before the attacks that appears to be a warning from the shooter, although that has not been confirmed:
The video, set to hard-driving music, shows a still photo of a school that appears to be Jokela High School, where the shootings occurred some 40 miles from the Finnish capital, Helsinki.
The photo then fragments to reveal a red-tinted photo of a man pointing a gun at the camera.
It is entitled “Jokela High School Massacre - 11/7/2007″ and was posted by a user called Sturmgeist89. “Sturmgeist” means storm spirit in German.
YouTube.com has suspended the user’s account, and the video is now nowhere to be seen on that site, but CNN and Britain’s Telegraph had a chance to grab a few still images.
Police said that the 18-years-old shooter was seriously wounded and being treated at a hospital, according to The Associated Press. But it wasn’t clear if the injuries were from police or his own gun.
A survey released in August ranked the Scandinavian country third on a list of most-armed nations, behind the United States and Yemen. For every 100 people in Finland, there are 56 guns, according to the study.
But none of Finland’s guns had been used in a school prior to today, BBC News said. And Europe in general has suffered far fewer such incidents than the United States.
In 1997, a shooter killed 16 children at a school playground in Dunblane, Scotland. In 2002, a massacre in Erfurt, Germany, left 17 dead and helped shake “the European notion that such incidents happen only in America,” The New York Times wrote at the time. In the aftermath, blame fell to the United States and its influence abroad:
Stunned and grieving, some Europeans have taken to re-examining their societies, fretting that they have lost the communal warmth that once prevailed outside large cities.
Instead, they fear they are leaving their frailest citizens feeling isolated in an indifferent, money-driven marketplace, which is widely described as an American pathology spreading with globalization.
Whether that will be the conclusion in today’s case remains to be seen, although the line from Jokela High to Virginia Tech and Columbine seems an easy one to draw.