Monday, March 12, 2007

Unusual objectives dangers

"Objective dangers" is the term used by climbers (mountaineers in particular) to describe climbing risks that don't come from your own behaviour but rather from the environment you are in. OK - so as a climber you choose to put yourself in that environment, but beyond that you take my point... Hence, falling off a badly protected route is not an objective danger, but rockfall or avalanches are.

Anyway it appears yesterday we were climbing a few hundred metres away from a mad man with a number of automatic weapons. We even drove past the numerous police vehicles and said - "I wonder what's going on there? That's a lot of police." I think I'd prefer to take my chances with rockfall.

Finnish attitudes to these events can be almost jocular - "crazy drunk guy shoots up a load of cars! There's one in every village eh? Ha ha." but the cop who got injured had a bullet graze his head. A few inches from tragedy I would say. I'm pretty liberal on most things, but I still just don't see why the public should have the right to own weapons that have no purpose other than for killing other people.

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