On Tuesday, September 23, 2008, 22 year-old Matti Juhani Saari, a student at the School of Hospitality in Kauhajoki, Finland, a town of approximately 14,000 inhabitants, walked into the classroom where he was scheduled to take a business studies exam and shot his teacher and nine students before turning the 22-calibre handgun on himself. 
What’s even more disturbing is that the worst school shooting in Finnish history, although not the first, could have been prevented, as policemen visited Saari the day before the shooting after finding a disturbing video he’d posted on YouTube.
The video showed Saari at a shooting range unloading a Walther P22 pistol and reciting a poem that made reference to war and violence. After meeting with Saari, the police decided not to seize his weapon, a decision that would leave all of Finland shocked and with an upsetting feeling of deja vu the very next day.
In November 2007, 18 year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen murdered eight people, including six students, at a high school in the town of Jokela. At the time, the shooting was deemed an isolated incident, but the shooting at Kauhajoki proves that it was not.
Matti Saari
In lieu of these events, Interior Minister Anne Holmlund has promised to draft amendments to the country’s firearms law. There are currently 2 million firearms in Finland, a country with only 5 million inhabitants.
-Justine Bayod Espoz, Picore Worldwide’s Marketing Expert-Spain