School Shooting

Today we were called in to the teacher's room right after lunch. At that moment, about 200 kilometers to the south, a gunman was shooting up his school, a vocational school. I cannot get much more information, 9 people have been confirmed dead now and possibly the gunman, too, who shot himself. I have no access to the internet and my host father isn't watching the news on tv. I believe this is only the second time ever something like this has happened in Finland, the first time it was at a secondary school about a year ago, I have been told. It is not all over the television. After we were told about it a teacher turned to me and started asking about lesson plans for next week. My thesis about most Finns being unwilling to talk about bad things is hard to determine through personal relationships, but it seems to have some truth to it on a national scale. In the least there is certainly a difference between American and Finnish reactions to tragedies... Americans would have the news of it all over every basic channel and radio station, and everyone would be talking about it a lot. Especially if it was happening less than 200 kilometers away. Now the television has turned to a press conference about the shooting—although it is being reported on now, it still is markedly different than how American television would report it. It is a paneled press conference, with specific people reading prepared remarks. And this is happening about 3 hours after the shooting took place. In America, there would probably be journalists interviewing shocked and horrified witnesses and anyone else who so much as had an opinion about it, there would be video footage rolling nonstop of fellow students screaming and crying, terrified and angry. Both ways of handling the tragedy seem strange to me—one too business-like, the other too sensational. But I don't know how I would direct media to deal with it. How does one deal with something so horrible and senseless?

A teacher also said that it was 'big news' last year when the first shooting happened, because no one expected it to occur in Finland. “We have no locks on our classroom doors, no sealed gates, nothing by the way of security,” she said, “there wasn't need for it. Maybe that's changing.” It might be that I have come to admire the trust and respect for students in one of the last and dying systems where teachers trust to leave their students unsupervised... it may be that some of what I want to bring back to America are values that it cannot afford to employ, values that are going to start being swept away in Finland because the world is afraid of youth with guns for good reason. But why are there so many murderers among us? Why so many murder-suicides at places of education??!