reading this, my view of Paris Lane’s suicide changed. Perhaps his death was more a response to power than to pain, I thought. And in so thinking, the gun took me down a path that led away from those impacted by guns, towards those who wield them.
III. Power
5. THE KILLERS
The world of mass shooters and assassins – Finland recalled – a bloody day in a teaching college – the American mass shooter examined – Norway – travelling into the wilds – the scene of the worst mass shooting in history – an Oslo drink with a killer’s expert – a meeting with Julian Assange in London – the ugly offerings of the dark web
There are many types of people who kill other people with guns.
There are those who do so for the explicit control of power. They are, by and large, criminals, gang members, terrorists, policemen or military personnel. When they pull a trigger and a life is ended, people in one of these groups do so out of obedience to a specific ideology or dogma. It could be a desire to control the streets, an urge to rob, to protect their nation, to maintain order, even to exact retribution. Of course, when they take a life they all become killers. But their actions are generally not driven by a desire to kill for killing’s sake. Death is a by-product of something else – usually power and control.
There are the untold numbers of killers who are gun owners who use their weapons for acts of personal power. Those caught in a moment of passion, despair, anger or self-defence, who use their guns to take a life. Sometimes their actions are justified, often not. These deaths are usually not premeditated; rather they are a specific response to threats, passions or fears. And the motivations behind this use of the gun are so diverse that to understand what makes such people kill is as complex as understanding life itself.
Then there are those two groups who seek a darker form of power – for whom death is the thing they seek. Killing not as a by-product of protection, or defence, or desire, but death as a means to its own powerful end. These are the mass shooters: all too often young men who go on the rampage and kill in a single, public event. They defy the normal motives for violence – robbery, envy, personal grievance. They ignore basic ideas of justice.
Or the assassins. That rare breed of cruel men who are paid to kill, and for whom money cannot be the only reason they do this job, because you can always earn a living doing something else.
Mass shooters and assassins: two groups I felt had to be the first things to write about when I shifted my gaze away from those whose lives were lived and ended at the end of a gun and entered the world of those holding the gun in their hands.
The snow was beginning to fall on that September day in 2008 when I walked through a muffled forest that surrounded a small town in western Finland. I had travelled out to the creeping edge of Kauhajoki and there, caught within an endless line of trees, was trying to find a rifle range. A place where a now-dead man had been filmed a few days before, shooting at targets, and where his poisonous words foretold a horror.
I had left the road ten minutes earlier and cut into the claustrophobic woods and was now lost. The sound of my feet breaking the frozen ground cut the quiet. Thoughts about the Finnish wolf and bear, out there beyond the corridors of trees, distracted me. And then, ahead, between the pines, I saw the outline of a wooden shooting range.
The cracking of the leaves startled the man. I first noticed him as he began to turn; his coat blended well with the leafy surrounds. Then I saw the rifle loosely cradled in his arm. This was not the time, nor the place, to meet a stranger with a gun.
A few days before, a young Finnish man, a twenty-two-year-old called Matti Juhani Saari, had done the unthinkable. He had walked into his college and killed ten people. Saari had gone on the rampage about 5 miles from here, at the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality. He had crept into the university buildings through the basement and, armed with a Walther P22 semi-automatic pistol, wearing a balaclava and dressed in military black fatigues, had gone upstairs. He acted as if he was on a combat mission, but he was the only enemy in this quiet Finnish town.
At 10.30 that morning Saari had walked into an exam room, filled with his fellow students taking a business studies paper, and opened fire. He approached his victims one by one, shooting each at close range. He then stepped into the corridor, loaded a new clip and returned to kill his teacher. He slowly moved around the classroom, delivering a vicious coup de grâce to whoever made a sound.
After he had killed, Saari called a friend to boast about what he was doing. He then poured petrol onto the crimson-stained floor, dropped a match and walked outside, the fire rising behind him. As the flames rose, nine classmates and one teacher lay dead and eleven more injured in the cruel flickering. Saari watched the rest of the students running, screaming, out into the thin light of a Finnish autumn, then he shot himself in the head.
With a total of eleven people now dead, it was the deadliest peacetime attack in Finnish history. Saari had fired 157 shots, sixty-two of which later were found in the bodies of his victims.1 Twenty rounds were in one person alone.
One bullet, the least lamented, was the round he used on himself.
With that final shot his pistol also sounded the start of a different race, a race for journalists to get to the scene, to report on the terror created by that most modern of things: the mass shooter.2
I happened to be in Oslo at the time and, because news desks in London do not think: ‘It would take him seventeen hours to drive there, and it’s 700 miles away,’ but rather: ‘Norway is close to Finland, so let’s send him,’ they called me.
‘Get packing. We’re going to send you to Finland.’
And that was it. I was with Jenny Kleeman, an up-and-coming journalist, and we were reporting for ITN on Norway’s immense oil wealth. We were analysing Oslo’s sovereign investment funds when we got the call, and death was the last thing on our minds. But a day later we had flown (not driven) to Kauhajoki, a place forever marked by what had unfolded there and one that left its mark on me – because it was my first encounter with the grotesque realities of mass shootings.
We hit the ground running. My editor back in London was hungry for facts about why Saari had done what he had done, and we quickly learned that the troubled killer, in the weeks leading up to the incident, had posted several videos online under the username ‘Wumpscut86’. His terrible message: ‘You will die next.’ The videos showed him firing his Walther P22 at a local range.
That was why I was lost in that wood. I was at that range – Saari’s last location captured on film. The young killer was dead, but at that moment no one knew who had been behind the camera – an accomplice, even? I looked down at the man’s rifle, and my mind clouded with the possibilities.
The man turned and stared intently. Then he tutted. And I realised what I had first mistaken for rage was actually annoyance. Saari had just filmed himself, and this man was not going to kill me. He was just bothered that I was here, stumbling about in the forest with my video camera. Because my presence, in this remote province of this little-visited country, was a clear signal to him of what was to come: a bloody media spectacle.
The modern mass shooter and the modern media are intrinsically linked. Columbine, Dunblane, Sandy Hook: journalists, responding to the final performance of a lone shooter, have ensured that these place names are forever marked. In news ‘if
