Yet shootings such as these are rare and this sort of event is unheard of in Finland. Should the millions of other Finns who responsibly own handguns be deprived of their right to handgun ownership because of a mentally ill student who abused that right? Do you think he wouldn't have just chosen a rifle or shotgun instead?
Only in America would anybody feel "deprived" for not being able to own weapons for no reason.
Statistics show that in Finland more than 30% own weapons while the average in the rest of Europe is around 3 %.
How does removing the gun remove the desire to commit such an act? It doesn't. Address the cause, not the method. Honestly, it's like fighting terrorism. You cannot fight terrorism with guns. You must remove the desire in people who feel so extremely disenfranchised that they become terrorists.
You are right, stricter weapon laws don't stop terrorism, but it can stop sudden rages from becoming massacres.
When you fly off the handle, you use what you have access to.
The killer signed up at a downtown Helsinki commercial shooting club on October 19, payed the fee, no questions, and got his membership card. Never ever visitited the place again. On November 2 he buys his gun, as the membership validates it.
His schoolmates describe him as a smart, intelligent guy, but increasingly isolated. In history classes he was said to have had "wild extreme ideas".
In his suicide note to his family, and in his net postings all this fall, and just an hour before the killing, he claims his superiority and goal of eliminating inferior creatures of a rotten society. He wanted to "better the world" and chose a twisted tragical way to express it. - He was a net pal with a 14/15-year old guy in the USA who this year was arrested after he was found planning a similar school killing. His alarming mental condition and the exceedingly evident violence-bound behavior was well documented in YouTube since last spring.
Only this fall was his account closed, but he opened a new one a week after, and announced there what was to come.
The net world has created an incredible way to exist, to become your reality. I find it mad that nobody who was reading his more and more irrational and threathening posts reacted before it was too late.
Commercial shooting clubs will face scrutiny for reason here. Finland with its dark winters is, indeed, depression prone, with a high suicide rate for young guys. His was really a suicide, he wanted to do it real public and wide.