COMMENTARY: The Minister's Thought For the Day

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By Jaakko Lyytinen
     
      Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
      This claim is repeated over and over in the United States when that country faces up to another shooting incident.
      It is trumpeted for instance on bumper-stickers belonging to supporters of the National Rifle Association.
      The NRA is one of the most powerful lobbying organisations in the United States.
     
Now Finnish gun enthusiasts are in such a jam that the NRA argument has begun to be used here, too.
      It was also apparently grasped by the cabinet member responsible for firearms control, Minister of the Interior Anne Holmlund (National Coalition Party).
     
Last Thursday, just over 48 hours after the vocational school shootings in Kauhajoki, Minister Holmlund was one of four guests on A-Talk, a current affairs panel discussion on the Finnish Broadcasting Company’s TV1.
      With her were the editor-in-chief of the gun magazine Ase-Lehti, a police inspector from Varkaus, and the headmaster of the Tikkurila Upper Secondary School.
      When the journalist moderator asked Holmlund for her own views on the tightening up of Finnish firearms legislation, the minister said she would form her opinion after hearing from “experts”. It sounded as though Holmlund’s “experts” do not perhaps represent the most gun-critical segment of the population.
     
Police Inspector Jyrki Haapala, sitting on the opposite side of the table, mounted a markedly more vigorous defence of stricter rules on the ownership of guns than did his ultimate boss Holmlund, the minister with responsibility for the police and internal security.
      And in a lull in what became quite a heated discussion, out popped the phrase from Holmlund’s mouth:
      “It is not as if a gun itself kills anyone. If it is in the hands of the wrong user, it is a dangerous lethal weapon.”
     
Absolutely, Minister Holmlund.
      And it is not as if cars kill people, but rather the nut-jobs that drive them when they have had a skinful.
      And the very same goes for bread-knives and pairs of scissors, those misunderstood innocent kitchen tools.
      Or vacuum cleaners. Yes, reader, a Hoover can kill, or at least it could in the grim and gritty Finnish movie Paha Maa (Frozen Land, 2005).
     
And yet none of the above are being banned in the panic-stricken wake of the second school shooting incident in Finland in less than 12 months.
      Are they, Minister Holmlund?
      Or could it be that there is in firearms one very basic difference from these other lethal weapons?
      Cars and scissors were not initially designed to be used for killing people.
      You just try wasting ten people with a vacuum cleaner.
     
Aside from the NRA’s famous argument, the association’s Finnish namesake also made landfall here a couple of years ago.
      Runo K. Kurko, the president of NRA Kansallinen kivääriyhdistys (the National Rifle Association of Finland), appears regularly and often in the media as “a firearms expert”.
      His expertise and opinions can be examined for instance from the “President’s Column" on the nra.fi website.
      After Jokela, Kurko found the reasons for the atrocity in excessively large schools, the introduction of a classless upper secondary education programme that hampers teacher-pupil interaction, and in the haste among parents attempting to forge a career and the corner-cutting that ensues in bringing up children to satisfactory adulthood, not to mention in Finland’s membership of the European Union, which has worsened the Finns’ collective wellbeing.
     
And then of course there was the Internet, a “spreader of evils” in a class of its own, a “presenter of executions and perversions, and a spur to criminal activity".
      "The Internet must be brought under control, for the international community is suffering from the open access to the ‘Information Superhighway’”, wrote Kurko on November 18th, 2007.
     
Now Kurko and his colleagues are demanding the resignations of Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen and Interior Minister Holmlund, since the decision-makers did not adhere to the Finnish NRA’s five-point plan of action after Jokela.
      NRA Finland urged for instance that the parents of someone under the age of 18 applying for his or her first gun should be interviewed about their attitude towards firearms, and that it should be possible to demand a certificate from a psychiatrist from an adult appllying for a first firearms licence.
      These and other proposals made the NRA sound almost like a mental health assocation.
     
In this way, the civil rights organisation (their expression) sought to direct criticism away from gun-freaks and to appear downright moderate in their stance.
      If the firearms laws are tightened up, it may well be that the Finnish adherents of the NRA will find more support.
      We shall know this has happened when bumper-stickers start to appear in Finnish with the minister’s thought for the day on them.
      Guns themselves don’t kill anyone. Not of themselves. Oh, no.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 28.9.2008


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Calls for Interior Minister to resign; Katainen backs Holmlund (26.9.2008)

Links:
  National Rifle Association of Finland

JAAKKO LYYTINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
jaakko.lyytinen@hs.fi