What if this happens in my school tomorrow? Tearful young voices have filled Finnish emergency helplines with this question. There are no answers.

Before killing eight innocent people, Pekka-Eric Auvinen wrote on his blog where, when and how he was going to do it. When this 18-year-old admirer of Hitler and the Columbine killers bragged that he had finally got a gun nobody listened. Even when he posted a YouTube video about his plan to massacre a school, nobody believed him. Why? Because this kind of thing does not happen in Finland. Columbine is far away from our backyard and the world we know.

So when the first bullet was shot in Jokela High School, a typical Finnish school where any of us could have sent our children, the only clear thing was that there was no going back to what Finland had been. For the first time since the Second World War, there was fear.

My home is not far from where the tragedy took place in southern Finland. Like anyone, we often leave our home door unlocked because we don't have to worry about crime or violence; we consider it normal that our President can walk among her fellow citizens to work. However, the world press quickly painted a picture of a gloomy, half-light country full of suicide, guns and dark heavy metal music. But living in Finland isn't like that. Most Finns consider being born here as akin to winning the lottery of life. Yes, murders happen from time to rare time: but the classic Finnish homicide is of someone knifing his best friend after an argument on a drunken fishing trip — and then, remorse-stricken, handing himself in to the police.

But since Wednesday, the streets now feel edgy and people have started asking the awkward question — was our society too naive to see this lurking danger?

My mother, who has spent all her working life as a teacher of problem children, points out that the Finnish mentality is reserved and unsociable, so loners have never been considered that different or a threat to society. During her 30-year career with the worst misfits of Finnish society, it seemed reasonable not to take even the verbal threats of violence too seriously. Not in Finland. What she now sees, as the whole nation does, is that as unlikely as the Jokela massacre was, we might nevertheless have been too blue-eyed to foresee the signs of trouble.

For if we take a closer look we might just find the hidden potential for this disaster. Depression and loneliness are common in this country of short winter days — Finland is a third larger than the UK but has less than a tenth of the population, so many people live remote existences. And is it a coincidence that one of my friends is part of the tragically large percentage of Finns who have killed themselves? The annual suicide rate is nearly 21 deaths for every 100,000 people; that's three times the British rate. Nor can you avoid meeting alcoholics; some of my younger friends are proud of their ever heavier drinking habits.

One could also argue we have a Bowling for Columbine problem. We Finns, with a tradition of hunting for both pleasure and livelihood, have the third largest per capita ownership of handguns in the world. While none of my friends owns a gun, I would imagine anyone could get one — and with compulsory military service every man over 18 years is used to shooting. Mental problems and gun ownership sound like a toxic combination but still there are few gun-related crimes or cases of the mentally unstable hurting anyone other than themselves.

Some blame the internet for changing Finnish society. Before the www era, the stereotype was of a shy and reserved Finnish person who used alcohol to ease social encounters. In the beginning, the internet was almost seen as rescuing the Finns from alcoholism and loneliness. People felt it was easier to make contact with others through the cyberworld knowing they could hide behind their computer screens and pseudonyms. Little wonder that Finland is one of the most wired-up countries, with three quarters of us using the net. Internet chat forums and groups soon became the most common way for young people to socialise. Facebook, YouTube and Irc gallery are now an everyday necessity for Finnish youth.

But the internet is unregulated. Auvinen was influenced by extreme internet pages. Other Finnish students have been caught watching beheadings and X-rated material on school computers. And it is the nature of the internet to push people to ever more extreme sites.

But, despite all that, it would be a mistake to see the Jokela killings as a “Finnish thing”. These types of outrages are as likely as anywhere in the world we live in. The murderer's rambling internet manifesto shows just how random everything was; even his clumsy attempts to use difficult concepts from Darwin and Nietzsche to justify his actions.

A friend who is covering the tragedy for Finnish television tells me that the unanimous opinion on the streets is that everybody sees and condemns this tragedy as the cowardly work of a single sick, attention-seeking individual. But understanding that such horror is the random result of the actions of one irrational and inhumane man does not answer that tearful question: “What if it was my school tomorrow?”

Aki Riihilahti is a Finnish international footballer and an occasional columnist for The Game

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