Where balanced people go hunting and not so go on a rampage…. figuring who’s who in the zoo
One month ago a student killed eight people at a school in Jokela, which is a small town about 50km from Helsinki the capital of Finland. He then killed himself, which, according to Finnish experts was what he went out to do. He was on a modern suicide mission, it had to make the press, he had to make it matter.
A few days earlier I had been giving a table full of Americans a hard time about their gun carrying, all but one had at least one gun at home.
I live in Australia where we had our share of ‘I cannot believe something like this could happen here, in this great country where people are friendly and easygoing’ in the mid 90s in Tasmania.
In Norway, also in the 90s, two small kids effectively killed another as they left the poorly dressed girl outside in the snow.
In Australia some 25 years ago a girl was kidnapped and killed and it became impossible to let kids get to school on their own. The society changed. The difference in that regard to Finland for example was noticeable when I first arrived to Australia in the late 80s.
These are examples of ill or otherwise unbalanced persons’ warped ways to deal with life and the societies’ inability to spot the illness and instill enough ‘understanding of consequences, yes they will come’ and help. Granted in some instances those consequences are part of the truly ill person’s agenda, which is harder to deal with, where ‘stranger danger’ education is about the only way to effectively handle it, bar the continuous parental supervision.
So the questions I keep asking are:
1/ Do we live according to the balanced people’s needs and agendas or the minorities’?
2/ Do we allow awful events to change life for everyone forever?
3/ What should the gun laws dictate if we cannot get the societal controls in place?
4/ What are the means for the societal controls or facilitation?
There is no such thing as absolute freedom. One person’s freedom is another person’s limitation.
The nations mentioned dealt with the shocks very differently.
In Australia there was a mass collection of guns and the ability [as against right] to carry arms was made more controlled.
In the US there is a fundamental belief that every person should have the right to carry arms to protect their families and territories. This was described to me as a remnant from the days of the wild west when such measures were necessary due to great distances from one home to the next, itinerant robbers and poor law and order.
In Finland the jury is still out as to how the society will react.
In Norway the whole society took part in a conversation on what kind of a nation the Norwegians wanted based on the ‘isolated’ event. The population voted “no we do not want to live under the tyranny of the event”.
It is clear to me that if you combine unbalanced people in a society not ready to cope with its ill, providing with easy access to guns and lots of airtime given to these events [and many other not airtime worthy things] it combines into a higher potential for the person(s) to enact for being noticed, belonging, even if it is to a group of bottom dwellers.
I asked my son what he would like for me to write about in the blog. He said write about how your youth was different from what the youth do today. As I thought about his idea I came to this as I find that the young today seem to deal with many ills, which did not exist when I was a kid. These unfortunate incidents caused by unbalanced young on other young have become news worthy. When I was a kid we got a bloody nose or we sulked about awful friends for a little while or even a long while and that was it and anything that went beyond would not have been known about, did not become an example for others.
I find that the young are parent shadowed a lot. Not giving kids the space to be kids.
It is a sad sad situation and the ostrich approach to this problem has not worked very well. Now what?
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
