Finland’s school attack: An isolated event in the EU country that has the most firearms per capita

Tuesday’s shooting at a school in the Helsinki metropolitan area, in which a 12-year-old boy killed a classmate and wounded two others, has reignited the debate on firearms in Finland. The attack at the school in Vantaa shocked the Nordic country, which has the most rifles, shotguns and handguns per capita of all European Union members. The attack is reminiscent of the 2007 and 2008 school shootings, which resulted in almost 20 deaths and led to the tightening of legislation on the possession and use of weapons in the country.

Firearms abound in Finland. Hundreds of thousands of Finns are keen hunters, especially in the north of the country. Many citizens also practice sport shooting, which has several forms with deep roots in northern Europe. According to the Small Arms Survey, a research project of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID, Geneva), Finland has the seventh most firearms in the world, and the most in the EU, in relation to its population (32.4 per 100 inhabitants), behind only the United States, Yemen, Montenegro, Serbia, Canada and Uruguay.

Despite the large number of guns, mass shootings — those causing at least four victims — are very rare in Finland; fewer than a dozen have taken place in the last century. Until this Tuesday, there had never been a deadly gun incident in which the attacker and victims were so young — they were all 12 years old.

15 years ago, school shootings were at the center of the Finnish political debate. In less than 12 months, two school massacres forced Finnish leaders to act. In September 2008, a young man shot and killed 10 people before committing suicide at a vocational school. At the end of the previous year, a student had murdered eight fellow students at a high school. In both cases, the attackers legally possessed the firearm they used.

A law passed in 2011 raised the minimum age for owning firearms from 18 to 20, but those over 15 can still obtain permits to use pistols or shotguns registered in a family member’s name. Applicants must now pass a fitness test and doctors are required to report any licensed gun patient they feel may pose a danger.

Following the tightening of gun ownership requirements, school shootings as serious as the ones that took place 15 years ago have not occurred since. However, in 2012 a young man shot several classmates in a school with a shotgun; no one was killed. Shortly thereafter, there were two knife incidents at schools in the north of the country, in which one student died and four people were injured.

Mental health

Many details are still unknown about Tuesday’s shooting in Vantaa, but it has reopened the debate on bullying and student mental health in a country that the UN rates as the happiest in the world and whose education system is perceived as a model by other EU members.

Visibly emotional, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo promised at a press conference that the authorities will conduct a thorough investigation into the tragedy and assured that, following the findings, his government will address the problem of school violence. “It is very clear that too many young people — up to one in three — have experienced mental health problems at some point. We need to be able to intervene earlier,” Orpo said.

The commissioner of the Finnish police, Seppo Kolehmainen, noted that different types of threats against schools are detected almost every week, and that officers sometimes have to patrol schools to maintain security. “Collectively, we thought that we had learned from previous school shootings as a society, but a day like this never should have happened,” Kolehmainen said. In mid-March, police arrested a 23-year-old woman who intended to attack the University of Vaasa in the west of the country. The young woman was arrested after posting a video on social media in which she mentioned her plans. Officers found a firearm and several cartridges at her home.

There are more than 1.6 million registered firearms in Finland, and nearly half a million people have licenses to own them (there is no limit on the number of handguns, rifles or shotguns a single person can own). According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in the last five years Finland has had a homicide-by-firearm rate of 0.14 per 100,000 inhabitants, a statistic similar to that of Spain, France or Italy, and four times lower than that of Sweden.

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