Finland was caught off guard by a school shooting. They are among the record holders in the number of weapons

Finland was shocked on Tuesday morning by a shooting at a school in the city of Vantaa, north of Helsinki, in which one student died and two others were injured.

The police suspect a twelve-year-old student of the attack, who is therefore not criminally responsible due to his age. According to investigators, he used a gun that was legally owned by his relative. You can read details about the attack and the investigation in this article.

Shooting attacks are not common in Finland. The Gun Violence Project, funded by the European Union, said in its report last year that the last such incident happened in 2016, when an attacker killed three people outside a restaurant in the city of Imatra. In 2009, five people were killed in a shooting in a shopping center in Espoo.

When it comes to attacks on schools, we need to go a little deeper into history, specifically to the years 2007 and 2008. In the first case, an 18-year-old student in the town of Jokela shot dead eight people, including six pupils, and a year later another student murdered nine pupils and a teacher .

It was after these two events that Finland tightened the laws on the possession of weapons, Reuters writes. The country introduced an aptitude test for all gun license applicants, while raising the age limit for gun owners from 18 to 20.

However, even fifteen-year-olds can legally obtain weapons in Finland. He is allowed to apply for permission to use a weapon owned by someone else, writes the British BBC.

However, the number of guns held by civilians in Finland is one of the highest in Europe in terms of population, as the following table shows. There are 32.4 guns per 100 inhabitants, in the Czech Republic it is 12.5 guns. The Nordic country on the continent is surpassed only by Serbia, Montenegro and Cyprus.

The table can be searched by typing a value in the bar at the top. Clicking on a column header will sort the table by the values ​​in it.

According to Reuters, about 430,000 people in Finland hold a firearms license. There is no regulation that limits how many guns someone can own. Hunting and target shooting are traditionally popular in the country with approximately 5.6 million inhabitants.

However, the number of people who die due to the use of a firearm remains relatively low in Finland. There are 0.21 of them per 100,000 inhabitants, in the Czech Republic it is 0.12.

The table can be searched by typing a value in the bar at the top. Clicking on a column header will sort the table by the values ​​in it.