Kauhajoki: Caring and trust are the keys to a sense of community
EDITORIAL
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In Kauhajoki on Tuesday, the worst happened. It was a worst that was made imaginable - let alone something to be feared - only after the tragedy in Jokela last November.
At a vocational college, the lives of ten young people were ended as a fellow-student shot them down in cold blood with a pistol.
The killer later died in hospital from a self-inflicted wound.
In addition to the dead, three other Kauhajoki students were injured.
Until last autumn, the only stories written about the Finnish school system in the international media were positive ones.
Up in that northern land, good teachers instruct their students so efficiently that Finnish school pupils outshine others and regularly occupy the top placings in many subjects in international league tables.
In slightly less than a year, a very different picture has been transmitted to the world outside: in per capita violence statistics, Finnish schools rank at the very top of the Western world's schools.
Nearly 20 young people have died violently at school during that time.
In countless schools, and above all in the homes of schoolchildren and students, the question is now being pondered: how we have come to this?
Has the school system concentrated on the quest for good grades at the expense of community?
Has the nurturing of empathy been forgotten in bringing up our young, allowing the unfeeling side in us to break free and run riot?
Do our educational establishments operate at the mercy of the efficiency benchmarks and barometers, and do they aspire blindly to statistical victories at the expense of humanity?
What could be done on behalf of caring in schools and other places of learning, and to build mutual trust and confidence?
The shootings in Jokela and in Kauhajoki are separate incidents, but they resemble one another closely in one respect: both gunmen introduced themselves and their interests on the pages of the Internet.
The online connections were in the best case an attempt both to discover a warm sense of community and to gain acceptance from peers, things they may have felt they were deprived of in the real world.
On the Net, those who seek to can become a member of many communities, but such groupings seldom take care of their members.
There is no cause to go blaming the Internet for this or other incidents, but one might well ask how much the online world feeds the darker side of the human character when it offers an artificial virtual world beyond the real, in which a person can believe he stands above and beyond others.
The web-presence of the Jokela gunman only came to the attention of the authorities after the murders had taken place.
In the case of the Kauhajoki killer, the video he posted on the Net was already pointed out to the authorities last week, and the young man was called in to be spoken to by police the very day before the shooting.
The police nevertheless did not see fit to confiscate a licensed and legitimate weapon from a 22-year-old man who behaved normally and who had been firing on a legal shooting range. The real horror-pictures of the gunman and his weapon appeared online only on the morning of the murders.
The Kauhajoki case demonstrates that the websites used by young people can serve as an alarm system.
Information about the shooting videos on YouTube reached the police, but the police were lacking in means to act.
After the deaths in Jokela there was much discussion of Finnish weapons legislation, which allows practically anyone to acquire a handgun for personal use.
The killer in Kauhajoki, too, had a recently-issued firearms certificate for a small-calibre pistol.
The .22-calibre gun in his hand nevertheless had enough punch to end the lives of many young people and spread untold suffering and destruction over a wide area.
Now we should consider carefully whether it is right to allow almost anyone to have in their possession even a small-calibre handgun.
At the same time we should ponder - once again - where the correct place is for storing weapons used in target shooting.
After Jokela, shooting clubs protested that keeping the guns in cabinets on the clubs' own premises would constitute a major security risk.
Two shooting incidents in schools indicate that guns kept at home represent no smaller risk. It is good that the government has promised prompt measures.
The two tragedies in our schools following one another in a space of less than a year prove that the sickness felt among young people is leading to increasingly brutal acts.
It is time to stop and think seriously whether the savage outbursts we have seen are the price of demands for greater efficiency.
The anxieties of our everyday life must not be allowed repeatedly to find release in mindless violence in this sadly violent land.
Helsingin Sanomat / First publishedin print 24.9.2008
Helsingin Sanomat
