On Wednesday, November 7, 2007 eight people have been killed and at least ten others injured in a shooting incident at Jokela High-School in the town of Tuusula in south of Finland. The gunman has been identified as Pekka-Eric Auvinen; an 18-year-old student at the Jokela High-School. The actual massacre had been preceded by a warning in the form of a short video clip posted on popular video-sharing website ‘YouTube’ several hours prior to the incident. After shooting eight people the man shot himself in the head causing him serious injury which turned out to be fatal after being transported to a local hospital.
The interesting point to this tragedy is that the shooter left behind a suicide letter entitled “Natural Selector’s Manifesto” in which he explains the motives for his deed and also presents his view of our world and humanity. A transcript of this letter can be found below this posting. It is a copy of a video-shot letter version that is available on YouTube. There were no changes made to the original document, even the grammatical errors weren’t corrected as far as I’m concerned. The reason why I compiled this letter into MS Word document is because it is simply hard to read the text off the actual video due to its low quality (the letters are sort of blurred or something). I hope you’ll find it useful.
Back to the point I was trying to make, the letter explains quite thoroughly the reasons behind young man’s action portraying almost the entire humanity as retarded, feeble-minded and easily manipulated mass. At the very end of his letter, Pekka (the shooter) claims that it is definitely not the music, movies, video games or the books that made him decide to commit such awful deed. Neither is it the parents or friends who should be blamed for his action, he says. He takes all the responsibility with him.
Although he denies that the types of media listed above had influenced him to perpetrate such crime I can still see a certain link between those two; however, it is rather a subtle one and not as explicit as authorities and people involved might be looking for.
It is for sure that media shape our opinions and attitudes we hold and in this case it seems that Pekka’s impression of humanity as being a retarded mass blindly following trends of consumerism goes hand in hand with the way the society is nowadays depicted in media. A consumer society obsessed with materialistic values. A swarm of people led by corrupted governments. Ultimately, these are the things that concerned young Pekka the most and frustrated him. He no longer wanted to be a part of this reality, he considered himself far more independent and capable of determining his own fate than the rest of the population surrounding him.
“Natural Selector Manifesto” – transcript of the suicide letter
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