Shootout

Well, as you may or may not know, there has been a serious case of school-shootout in Finland. There's not much to say about the tragedy itself, since words would be pretty pointless.

What I can talk about is the reaction of the media and people to the event. "Disappointed" doesn't even begin to describe my feelings. Where to begin...

First of all, media is telling how "we may never know the reasons for his crime". Well, apart from the lengthy manifesto he posted on the internet? Now, his motives are obviously screwed up, but they are nevertheless his motives. So we do know. We do not agree with them, we might not understand them, but we know what they are.

Second, we get the usual comments in the media that "did he practice the killing in videogames?". Um, no. Aiming with the mouse and clicking the mouse-button does not in any shape or form prepare you to fire an actual handgun on a living, breathing human being. And even further: the dude specificly said that games, movies, music, his parents or his friends are not the reason for his actions.

Third: we get bunch of people telling how we should "ban handgun". Well, banning handguns would not change the fact that this person was homicidial psycho. The gun was just a tool, not the reason. Had he not had a gun, he could have used a knife (like the killer in Japan did in 2001), or pipe-bombs, or Molotov cocktails instead. Guns are very rarely used for killing others in Finland, even though we are one of the most heavily-armed nations in the world. Usually people use knives or something similar.

What I find lacking is real discussion to the reasons for this tragedy. What could have been done to prevent it? What could we do to prevent future cases? What we DO get is pointless discussion about videogames and banning guns. Since knives kill a lot more people than guns do, why isn't anyone insisting that we should ban knives while we are at it? Instead of intelligent discussion, we have a moral panic, where people talk about the easy things: guns. Guns are easy to blame. But they are not the reason, they are merely a tool. They are easy to blame, but they are the wrong thing to blame. What they do not talk about are the hard things we should be talking about instead: why?