HELSINKI - FINLAND mourned the dead of its second school shooting in less than a year on Wednesday, and questioned whether it was time to clamp down hard on private gun ownership.
Interpol: don't blame police
PARIS - THE head of Interpol said on Tuesday that police cannot be blamed for school shootings like the one in Finland because they cannot know in advance what the suspect is going to do.
The issue of whether Finnish police could have stopped Tuesday's massacre arose because the gunman posted violent clips on YouTube beforehand. So did the gunman in another school shooting in Finland last year.
OSLO (Finland) - A DEADLY shooting at a Finnish school on Tuesday raises questions over tougher policing of the Internet after news the gunman posted menacing videos of himself on the Web before killing 10 people.
Student Matti Juhani Saari, 22, also killed himself in the incident closely resembling a 2007 massacre at another Finnish school, where that gunman also published messages on Internet video sharing site YouTube.
The main national daily Helsingin Sanomat replaced its usual front-page advertisement with a large picture of a woman adding a candle to a memorial in front of the school. The text above a picture of Saari read 'Why?'
'The Web cannot be held responsible for this, but you can certainly ask how much the Web feeds the dark side of human nature,' the paper said in an editorial.
Matti Saari, 22, shot and killed 10 people on Tuesday at a vocational school in Kauhajoki in western Finland - days after drawing police attention with online videos of himself at a gun range - and then turned the gun on himself.
He died later of a head wound in Tampere University Hospital.
Finnish media focused heavily on how police, alerted to Saari's videos, could question him on Monday but not confiscate the gun, how Saari could get a gun in the first place, and how to tighten Finland's gun law.
On Tuesday Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said Finland should consider banning private handguns altogether.
Gun ownership in Finland is among the highest in the world, but crime rates are low.
'The Kauhajoki shooter had a new gun permit for a small-calibre gun. Those calibres were enough, however, to end the lives of many young people and spread senseless pain and destruction widely,' Helsingin Sanomat said.
The Nordic nation has only started to recover from last Nov's school shooting, when 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed eight people, and then himself.
Finnish media focused on the similarities between the two shootings, including the use of boastful YouTube videos and the same calibre handgun.
'I am so scared and don't know what to do ... I thought this is a safe area. I've been living here for all my life. It's a small town and safe but I don't know if it's safe anymore,' said 17-year old Sanna Orpana, who was in Kauhajoki school during the shooting. -- REUTERS
