Redstate

By Mark Kilmer Posted in finland | Guns | Liberals | murder — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Finland is become a firing range. Eighteen-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen rampaged through his high school Wednesday, killing six of his fellow students and two members of staff before turning .22 caliber pistol on himself.

Now, it should be noted that this most important part of this story from the BBC is that Finland's gun laws are nothing if not out-and-out LAX.

Currently, 15-year-olds can buy guns with parental permission. Finland has the world's third highest rate of gun ownership according to a recent survey.

[ . . . ]
According to the Small Arms Survey, based in Geneva, Switzerland, only the US and Yemen have more firearms per capita.

To the BBC, out of Britain where guns do not exist, the killings in Finland should have happened years ago:

The shooting shocked Finland, which has low levels of violent crime despite the high rate of gun ownership.

It's the "gun ownership leads to violent deaths" line, tattered and torn but run up the lefty pole whenever someone kills many others using a gun. It's sloppy, weak, and a potentially invidious form of non sequitur. But for USA Today, a Finnish criminologist puts the wild-eyed theories of the British MSM to bed:

Jukka Savolainen, a criminologist at the Finnish Ministry of Justice, said gun crime is so rare in Finland because most of the country's firearms are hunting weapons. There are far fewer handguns, he said.

Savolainen, now a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, compares gun ownership in Finland to gun ownership in the rural USA. He said many U.S. shootings are in urban centers, where the drug trade and gangs escalate violence. "I'm from Helsinki, and I don't know anybody who owns a gun," he said.

But that seems more to be an Savolainen's part that the United States' problems of urban violence would vanish if we adopted the Finnish economic model, and there's something to that. Tell me you wouldn't vote the candidate, even Hillary, who had the bravado to promise us that "by the end of my first term, I promise you that we will have replicated the new, post-armed Finland from Maine to Mauna Loa."

Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the most recent murder-suicide from Finland, used a small caliber pistol, perhaps stolen from a lady's purse, to do his deeds. There was no machismo, no GUNS-MAKE-ME-POWERFUL adrenaline running through that kid's veins. He had issues, and you cannot legislate a teenager's gripes.