CLAIM: Walz said: “I’ve spent some time in Finland. I’ve seen some Finnish schools. They don’t have this happen.”
VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. Finland has fewer school shootings, but still has them.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) pushed for gun control at Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate on CBS News, and one argument he used was that Finland does not have school shootings despite high rates of gun ownership.
It is not true that Finland does not have school shootings. They do take place — though less frequently than in the United States, which differs from Finland in other important ways.
In 2007, for example, in the Finnish town of Jokela, there was a school shooting that gained international attention.
As CBS News reported at the time: “Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18, opened fire Wednesday inside Jokela High School Apparently selecting his victims randomly, he killed six fellow students, the school nurse and the principal before turning the gun on himself.”
A later academic study found factors that are familiar in American school shootings:
The perpetrator, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, pursued a clear and sophisticated media strategy and wrote a manifesto that underlined nihilism, hate, and disillusion with society and his peers. Auvinen was a shy, lonely young man who found his peer group in internet communities that glorify school shootings.
There have been other school shootings in Finland as well.
Vance, in his response to Walz, noted that mental health problems and substance abuse are factors in school shootings. He advocated doing more to secure schools against school shooters, including having more resource officers.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.