Teen Gun Ownership in Finland Under Fire

If you're under the impression that the United States is the only arms-happy country out there, you might want to take a look at Finland, the northern European nation where a gun-slinging culture is thrown together with the youth population to produce volatile results.

I read a recent article in Macleans magazine, which reports that Finland is considering raising the standards for gun ownership after having two separate school shootings in under three years. The shootings aren't to be taken likely in a small population of 5.3 million, where gun ownership per person ranks fifth in the world. The latter incident came in September 2008, when college student Matti Juhani Saari walked into his school in Kauhajoki and killed 10 people before taking his own life.

Raising the restrictions on arms-ownership is an obvious solution that should have been put in place a long time ago, if you ask me. As it stands, the minimum age for buying a gun is just 15 years old. Raising the limit to 20 years is one of the changes being discussed by the Finnish government.

Although it's hard to find specific statistics on youth gun ownership, consider the fact that the National Public Health Institute estimates that 15 per cent of young adults in Finland have a mental health issue. This adds a whole new dimension to an already-massive problem. And as psychology experts explain in this Cleveland.com article, incidences of public violence, like school shootings, trigger more of their kind.

Jerzy Sarnecki, a University of Stockholm criminologist, is quoted in the article as saying, "Each time it happens in a country, the probability that it will happen again gets higher. It triggers a terrible amount of fantasies in people who are psychologically unstable."

For the 650,000 gun-owners in Finland - and their more than 1.6 million firearms - new restrictions may not be looked upon so fondly. It might throw a wrench in the country's popular hunting pastime, but a new age limit and heftier registration policies (in other words, a lot of red tape), may be the only solution to keep the country from collapsing into even more violence.