Sad stuff, but not as sad as The Times

The vast majority of us has heard about this high school shooting that took place in Finland yesterday. Truly, truly awful indeed. But I was also appalled by the standard of The Times article that made this to be a 'very Finnish incident'. The author based his views on some bogus stories about the ancient gods of Finland and also assumed that because Finnish winters are dark and cold that all Finnish people only have the luxury of proper friendships (as the rest of the world knows them) during the summer months. He also assumed that due to high levels of ICT use - the internet networking and mobile phones were mentioned - amongst the population and the youth in particular, people are gravitating towards a lifestyle that is increasingly alienated from real human contact.

This was the author's argument for the shooting being a 'very Finnish incident' indeed. I might be wrong here but has there not been several instances in one particular country before this and were there no clear connections to these instances? Not that I'm going to elaborate here but you dont need to be very switched on to realise this.

I've been amazed and to some extent encouraged by the number of comments that the article in The Times has generated. Most of these are being sent from Finnish people responding to the absurd assumptions and analysis being offered by the author. However, and this is worth paying that extra bit of attention to, there is also a large number of foreign people that happen to live in Finland who have responded very eagerly against the author's comments. And to make things even more interesting, there was even a Swedish woman defending Finland. That really assured me that my personal reaction was not that far off. You see, Swedes have brains, where could we get some for this reporter fella?

The article also generously suggests that Finland has 120 people per square kilometer, where in fact this is more like 14. Big deal, I know... just had to get that out of my system too...

Another pussy lifted on the coffee table was the number of firearms in Finland. Apparently Finland has the third largest depository of firearms per capita in the world (after USA, surprise and Yemen! - makes me wonder about the validity of this stat). This means, supposedly, that 56% of Finnish people have a firearm. What the author gloriously has missed, is that the majority of these weapons are in the households where hunting is a serious thing, and that it is common for people who hunt to have more weapons than just one per head. You know, the moose deserves to be shot with a different slug than the boar, and the rabbit, and the partridge, and the duck, you get the point here?

Enough of my disappointment for now. It suffices to say that my level of trust in the analytical capabilities of The Times reporter in question has suffered significantly.

Lastly, I felt quite shocked about the incident itself and still it makes me feel really bizarre. The conflicting question inside me is asking whether the Finnish people think of their homeland as a good place to bring up children as a naive and taken for granted thing with regards to safety and all, or, will these instances reoccur in the near future and change the face and fabric of the society on the whole? I'm really not sure but I'd still like to see Finland retaining some of the qualities that I've always attributed to it, be it naively or not.

Over and out.