Finland, Violence, and the Internet

September 23, 2008

I first heard about the horrific shootings at a Finnish vocational school on the radio this morning. A gunman killed 10 students at the school, before turning the gun on himself. Even before I got to the office, I had an uneasy feeling that the first headlines I read about the incident would run along the lines of "YouTube Killer Runs Amok." Sure enough, there have been no lack of such headlines today. Finnish media have identified the gunman as Matti Juhani Saari, a 22 year old student who attended the school where the shootings occurred. It does appear that Saari had a YouTube account, where he uploaded videos of himself firing a handgun at a firing range. Saari also had a MySpace page, and was involved in an Internet Relay Chat service called IRC-gallery. Not unlike many a 22 year old in Finland and elsewhere.

(Picture of the scene outside the vocational school in Finland. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)