Finland school gunman was bullied

Helsinki, Finland: The teenager who killed eight people in a high school shooting in Finland was a social outcast who was bullied in school, a senior police official said Thursday.

“You can say that the motive is still open,” detective superintendent Tero Haapala told The Associated Press.

“But the explanation can be found mainly in his Web writings and his social behaviour.” Police named the killer as Pekka Eric Auvinen

The world's worst school shootings

• Charles Joseph Whitman was a student at the University of Texas at Austin who shot and killed 14 people (including those who later died as a result of their injuries) and wounded 31 others from the observation deck of the University's Main Building of The University of Texas at Austin on August 1, 1966. He did this shortly after murdering his wife and mother. He was eventually shot and killed by Austin police.

• The California State University, Fullerton massacre was an incident that occurred on the morning of July 12, 1976, when Edward Charles Allaway, a custodian at the Cal State Fullerton library, shot nine people in the basement and first floor of the library with a .22-caliber rifle. Seven of the nine wounded victims died. He was later found guilty of six counts of first degree murder and one count of second degree murder. However, a second phase of the trial determined that he was not sane. Five different mental health professionals diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. He presented a history of mental illness. He was committed to the California state mental hospital system, where he remains at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, as of 2007.

• The Columbine High School massacre occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in unincorporated Jefferson County, Colorado near Denver and Littleton. Two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a shooting rampage, killing 12 students and a teacher, as well as wounding 23 others, before committing suicide.

• The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting comprising two separate attacks about two hours apart on April 16, 2007, on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. The perpetrator, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people and wounded many more,^[4] before committing suicide, making it the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

• The École Polytechnique Massacre, also known as the Montreal Massacre, occurred on December 6, 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Twenty-five year-old Marc Lépine, armed with a legally obtained semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife, shot twenty-eight people, killing fourteen (all of them women) and injuring the other fourteen before killing himself.

• The Avivim school bus massacre was a terrorist attack that took place in Israel on May 8, 1970 near Moshav Avivim on the border with Lebanon. Palestinian gunmen from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) attacked the town's school bus, killing twelve people, mostly children.

• The Ma'alot massacre was an attack, carried out in Ma'alot, Israel by members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, that occurred on May 15, 1974, the 26th anniversary of Israeli independence. In this incident members of the DLFP murdered 22 religious high school students from the city of Safed.

• The Dunblane massacre was a multiple murder-suicide which occurred at Dunblane Primary School in the Scottish town of Dunblane on 13 March 1996. Sixteen children and one adult were killed, as well as the attacker who committed suicide. It remains the deadliest attack on children in United Kingdom history.

• The Erfurt massacre was a school shooting that occurred on April 26, 2002 at the Johann Gutenberg Gymnasium in Erfurt, Germany. Sixteen people were killed before the perpetrator committed suicide.