News

Whenever there's a terrible event like the school shooting at Dawson College in Montreal in 2006, or the shootings at Virginia Tech last year, many people look at the YouTube videos uploaded by the killers and wonder why someone didn't alert the authorities to the murderous themes in their videos and the potential mental instability of the shooters.

In the most recent school shooting -- in which Matti Juhani Saari opened fire and killed as many as 10 students at a school in Finland on Tuesday, before shooting himself in the head -- people concerned about Saari's potential for violence did exactly that. They notified the authorities about the videos, including one in which he was shown firing a pistol and then pointing it at the video camera and saying "You will die next."

Police even went so far as to interview Saari at his home on Monday, which they also searched. According to news reports, however, they found that Saari had a temporary permit to carry a gun, and said they could find no reason to either hold him or take the weapon. The next day, he arrived at the school with at least one gun and started shooting, as well as setting fires in various places along the way (there have also been reports that the gunman carried explosives). At last report, 10 people were dead and several more injured.

The gunman's YouTube account was removed after his name was reported in connection with the shootings, but a number of sites had already copied many of the videos and taken screenshots of his YouTube page. Although several of the videos (some of which are available here as well as here) show Saari firing a pistol, and violent lyrics from a German heavy metal band appear on the page -- where one of his favourites is a video related to the Columbine school shootings -- there are no explicit signs that he planned a school rampage, apart from the "You will die next" video clip. What more could the authorities have done?