Decision-makers from the Green League, the Left Alliance and the SDP approve of the idea of tightening gun laws.
Minister of the Environment and Greens’ chair Ville Niinistö calls for including the ban on handheld firearms in the government programme.
SDP party secretary Mikael Jungner echoes this opinion.
“It would be appropriate to go through weapons with great destructive power, in particular—to see who has those. And we could tighten controls over such weapons,” Jungner says.
Minister of Culture and Left Alliance head Paavo Arhinmäki would like to make conditions for granting firearms licences stricter.
No consensus
Minister of the Interior and Christian Democratic Party chair Päivi Räsänen rejected the idea of revising the gun laws in a web interview with the paper Ilta-Sanomat on Saturday.
Swedish People’s Party leader and Minister of Defence Stefan Wallin says that there is no reason to start tightening gun laws without looking into the issue further.
Chair of the opposition Centre Party and former Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi agrees with this view, noting that a change to gun laws has come into force very recently, at the start of June.
The events in Norway have also prompted discussion on the use of fertilisers’ raw materials—especially ammonium nitrate—in bomb-making. Environment Minister Niinistö would like a clarification on the dangerous substances contained in fertilisers and on preventing their misuse.