School Shooting in Finland Raises Questions Over Gun Control

An 18 year old Finnish high school student walked into Jokela high school on Wednesday with a gun and didn't come back out. The teen, Pekka Eric Auvinen, had published a series of youtube videos involving guns and various manifesto rants under the screen name Sturmgeist89, but no one could have known such a seemingly stable and happy person could have killed 8 people- including the school's mistress- before finally pulling the gun on himself.

The recent tragedy at Jokela high school has Finland wondering if they need to adopt gun control laws for the very first time. Gun ownership in Finland is among the highest in the world, but violent crimes with firearms are very rare. Compare that to the U.S. which has just as many guns per household, but a much higher firearm murder rate. This raises the question: What determines firearm murder rates?

Part of the answer could be found in population and America may just be too big for the kind of liberal gun laws seen in Finland. Infoplease has a recorded Finnish population of just over 5 million while America breaches 300 million. Naturally, the prevalence of gun crimes will increase with the population- but it doesn't fully explain violent crime rates in the U.S. Japan, for instance, has a population of over 127 million people but still, the country's gun crime rate is extraordinarily low. Part of this success is due to strict gun and weapon laws in Japan but for the most part, Japan's strong government, traditional values and inherit submissive populace may be the reason for such low crime rates with firearms. Author David B. Kopel dives into the issue of gun control in a book entitled The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? In his book the author reveals that the only firearm allowed to be bought in Japan is a shotgun and the buyer must be either a hunter or professional marksmen. Also, the licensing process is long and drawn out making gun ownership a hassle in the country. Although Kopel argues that gun control infringes on natural American rights, restraining the availability of guns may be a major factor in helping reduce gun crime here in the states as it has done in population dense Japan.

The U.S. Department of Justice found that "66% of the 16,137 murders in 2004" were committed with a firearm of some kind. A study entitled Global Firearm Deaths seems to reflect a positive correlation between gun ownership and murder rates involving guns. More available guns equals more murders, and aside from a few exceptions, this equation is biggest determining factor when it comes to gun crime. Finland may have been able to side step this correlation by associating guns with hunting and nothing else. In other words, shooting another person may just not occur to Finnish people. But with this recent school shooting, that assumption might not hold much ground any longer.

It would seem that halting the sale of guns in the United States may prevent many of these crimes from happening but powerful supporters of the American constitution have held hard to their right to own a firearm no matter how many tragedies occur. Lobbyists continue to push for more gun control but organizations like the NRA have ensured that guns continue to be sold and owned in America with little or no recourse. Still, Finland is considering gun control initiatives in order to prevent shootings like the one near Helsinki from occurring ever again. It's hard to say how many more firearm fatalities it will take before similar precautions will be taken in the United States, but chances are the constitution will hold up in spite of countless firearm incidents that occur here every year. The states may want to consider more closely more active gun control laws as a possible deterrent, because after events like these, it's much better to be safe than sorry.