8 shot dead in high school!

Yesterday was a day of terror and sadness and today has been declared a day of national mourning and flags are all day down to half pole accordingly.

An 18 year male high school student who had just last month received his shooting permit fired his gun in school yesterday killing 6 fellow students, the school nurse and the principal in the outskirts of the capital Helsinki. One more student got injured by gunfire and a dozen more students were injured by shards of glass when trying to flee from the site by windows. Apparently the gunman shot himself in the head and lies now in intensive care with life threatening injuries. This happened just minutes before noon and it was all over before even the police was notified it seems.

What makes it even sadder is that the student had posted a video clip on YouTube the day before announcing the school massacre to take place yesterday in advance and the incident hit the news big and it was on most news channels like the BBC by the evening, which is a sad way to make Finland noticed worldwide.

Nothing this big a massacre has even occurred in the Scandinavian countries before as far as I know, there was a bomb explosion in a shopping mall near Helsinki a couple a years ago with a teenage bomber that got killed in the incident.

The Scandinavian countries have so far been quite untouched, not to say virginal from massive violence. No terrorist bomb attacks to mention, just two Swedish politicians assassinated over the past two decades. This happening now rocks the security we have been living in bad, making all our lives more insecure about what can happen.

Even if our family was not personally affected it still touched closely having teenagers in high school, I can only try to imagine the fear and terror the parents with children in that school went through during the day with the ongoing incident, and feel empathy for the parents who lost their children in such a useless massacre.