Small Town Crime

Yesterday there was another “school-shooting” where ten people were killed before the perpetrator shot himself. This time it was in the small Finnish town of Kauhajoki. And as always when anything terrible happen there are interviews in the media and there are people saying they find it unbelievable that anything like that could happen “in this small town” and that they never thought anything like that could happen in “such a small town”. I guess it is natural not to expect things like that to happen to you, anyone you know or anywhere close to you. But if there is something we ought to know by now; it is that these things do happen, and to me it seems they happen more often in small places than in big cities. Ok, I haven’t checked this statistically, but of all the places I can think of where things like this have happened recently, none of them is a major city or capital. I am sure that on a per capita basis this kind of mad-man-crime is more prevalent in smaller towns and communities. So maybe it is really about time we stop romanticise the small town life.