LONDON — A Finnish teenager's shooting spree shows how the Internet may be fueling violence among alienated youths even in countries where such incidents were unheard of, psychiatrists and criminologists warned.
Flags flew at half-staff around Finland a day after 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed eight people at his high school Wednesday and then shot himself dead.
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Hours earlier, Auvinen had posted a video on YouTube anticipating his rampage with material that may have been inspired by the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado.
"No place in the world is protected from these bad things anymore … because they are connected through the Internet," said Fredrik Almqvist, professor of child psychiatry at the University of Helsinki.
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Almqvist and others who have studied school violence said the Internet gives alienated youths an opportunity to build an identity, copycat ideas for violent behavior and reinforcement for their antisocial views by those agreeing with them on Web pages.
In the end, the experts said, the Internet gives people a sense of immortality if they kill themselves, as Auvinen did.
"We live in a global, YouTube, MySpace culture," said Tom Nolan, professor of criminal justice at Boston University. "If you are inclined toward violent, antisocial behavior, what's a better way to leave your mark than on the Internet?"
The shooting, the likes of which are extremely rare on this side of the Atlantic, received heavy news coverage throughout Europe. The Times of London led Thursday's edition with the story under the headline "The YouTube killer."
Nolan said Auvinen's actions were comparable to the April 16 killings at Virginia Tech, where student Seung Hui Cho took several photos of himself posing with guns hours before he killed 33 people, including himself.
One of Auvinen's YouTube videos showed a photo of what appears to be his high school, while the song Stray Bullet by industrial rock band KMFDM played.
Stray Bullet was one of several KMFDM songs posted on a website maintained by Eric Harris, one of the two Columbine gunmen who killed 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide.
Auvinen also called for a popular uprising against "the enslaving, corrupted and totalitarian regimes" and grinned after taking target practice with a handgun.
Sean Neill of the Institute of Education at the University of Warwick in England said there is a "copycat and contagious aspect" to some school shootings.
Neill said Wednesday's shooting was shocking because Finland, like many Scandinavian nations, has a relatively egalitarian, pacifist society. Neill, who has studied violence in London schools, said Britons and Americans tend to be more individualistic, and violence is more prevalent in those countries.
However, Finland has a high suicide rate: 28.4 per 100,000 people, according to a 2002 World Health Organization report. In comparison, France's rate is 20.0, Germany's is 14.3 and the USA's is 13.9.
People in Finland also possess more guns than other Europeans per capita, although arms are more commonly used for sport and hunting than for self-protection.
"There are weapons available" in Finland, Almqvist said. "But we don't have the gun culture like America."
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