Last New Year’s Eve, Ibrahim Shkupolli stabbed his ex-lover, gunned down four of her colleagues at a Finnish shopping mall, and then turned the gun on himself. Shkupolli fired 10 shots from a pistol that had been stolen from a gun shop in Norway in 1990. He was an Albanian immigrant, who’d been denied Finnish citizenship after being convicted for violence, property and firearm crimes. Despite the fact that Shkupolli’s murderous rampage lies well outside the Finnish norm, it’s triggered legislative action to make it even harder—if not impossible–for a legal citizen to obtain a firearm. Which they can’t carry concealed, anyway. Perhaps it has something to do with previous spree killings; the gun control debate first entered the political mainstream after two school shootings in 2007 and 2008, where gunmen murdered a total 18 pupils and staff.
Hard to know either way, but utaemltily beside the point. Gun free zones are risk free zones for attackers, whether they know it or not. On the other hand, if the story were consistently that people who opened fire on crowds got shot after a few seconds, then it would probably become a lot less attractive. I just can’t see wanting to copycat a guy who’s 15 minutes are postmortem.A lot of these notorious attacks are notorious because the victims were completely defenseless. The Sikh temple shooting wouldn’t have made national news if the first person the guy had come across had been carrying and had dropped him. Then it’s just some crazy guy, and it’s an 11:00 local news story. Subtract defense, and now you have national news. Same thing at the Azana Spa. If someone there had had a gun, there might have been a chance of stopping that guy before he killed three people. It’s the same story, over and over.