Guardian UK: Finnish gun laws under fire

[marmar]

Finnish gun laws under fire
Reducing the number of guns in Finland would be a challenge – but if it prevents another shooting it would be worthwhile

Annikka Mutanen
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 31 December 2009 17.30 GMT


Five people were shot dead in a shopping mall near Helsinki today on a clear, bright day of new snow. It was the third mass killing in the last three years. Many Finns were also shocked to discover today that there are 1.6 million guns in our country of five million people. Some hunt with rifles, which is a very popular activity in the Finnish countryside, while others use pistols on shooting ranges. Good, ordinary people keep illegal guns as mementos from the second world war. Many of them were hidden away after 1945 in case of an attempted Soviet invasion.

The two previous incidents were school shootings where young, lonely and frustrated men had acquired a licensed gun and used it to try to get even with a school community that they felt had scorned and secluded them. They gave serious clues of their intentions beforehand, which raised the question of whether police should have acted early and taken their guns away – or whether they should have been licensed to buy a gun in a first place.

In the second case, the legal process is underway. According to the hearings, local policemen intended to confiscate the gun from Matti Saari but a senior police officer stopped them, interviewed Saari himself and let him keep his gun. The next day Saari shot 10 people and himself.

Today's killings were somewhat different. The suspected killer, Ibrahim Shkupolli, was a 43-year-old man of Kosovan Albanian origin. He shot his former partner at her home, four of her colleagues in the shopping mall where they were at work and, finally, himself. He had no licence for his 9mm pistol. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/31/finland-shooting-gun-laws