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The questions raised by Finland's latest school shooting

Today's massacre, less than a year after a similar tragedy, has sparked debate on internet censorship and Finland's allegedly violent culture

Today's shootings in Finland are the latest in a long and gruesome history of school massacres.

Debate is now likely to focus on what prompts young people to carry out such attacks and what - if anything - can be done to prevent them.

Fears have been voiced that the deaths of 11 people, along with the gunman's posting of YouTube footage showing him firing a weapon, will lead to a kneejerk reaction from politicians.

Maskoferis, a Finnish blogger, asks:

Should every gun nut that posts a video of himself shooting a few rounds be slapped in chains? Should every youth that scrawls a melancholy, misanthropic note or two somewhere on the internet be hounded by agents, deprived of all guns and sharp objects, shunted to psychological counselling?

His view is that this kind of random act can never be prevented:

People snap … and there's no way, short of a fascist police state, to keep people apart from the means of hurting others when they snap. Regrettable things like this do happen, and will happen. It is not a nice thing, but we shouldn't be too hysterical about it.

One online group has blamed society for the massacre, despairing over a world in which teenagers grow up "confused, angry, hurt and emotionally fragile".

It described the gunman as a "socially isolated individual" who was "desperate to communicate an inherent fault with our communities, but unable to get his voice heard without killing people".

This school massacre is another tragic event marking the ignorance and selfishness of our social environment. How many more deaths will be spilled before we change our lifestyle? When will we ever learn?

The chilling YouTube footage of the gunman has also has provoked questions about whether such sites should allow this kind of clip to be published.

The posting has now been taken down, sparking claims of internet censorship.

Today's killings will be the cause of some national soul-searching for Finland, not least about the country's prolific gun culture.

The shootings happened less than a year after nine people, including the gunman, died in a school shooting in the town of Tuusala, near Helsinki.

Is there something in Finnish society that drives some of its teenagers to carry out this kind of horrific act? Are the two recent tragedies the result of high levels of domestic violence and suicide in Finland, as some commentators suggest?

And how should the authorities, and society, respond?

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