Jarno Paulamäki, Professional nerd, occasional human being.
Yup. I live in Finland.
Few years ago I was travelling on business to US, and needed to drive around a bit in the area our branch office was in.
Not many days before there’d been a case of a black man being shot unprovoked in his car by police officers.
I was rather nervous.
You see, around my corner of the world, when a police draws a weapon in duty, there will be an after action review. If he fires it, especially towards a suspect, the officer’s actions will be reviewed, and it’s possible that they will be charged with anything from assault with a deadly weapon to murder.
Of course, if there’s a proper reason why they drew the weapon and fired at a suspect, they won’t be charged with anything.
Rule of law and all that.
Also, our elections. Paper ballot, direct votes for presidents; two rounds, first round basically anyone can be a candidate, no party restrictions or primaries or any of that hooey.
Parliamentary elections by voting a candidate, votes are tallied by party and vote receivers are ranked so that those getting most votes will be selected to parliament.
Representative democracy in action, none of that selection board crap.
Also - for all intents and purposes free medical care. My brother broke a disc from his spine, got it replaced with an implant, general anesthesia, neurosurgeon plus whole staff of an OR. Cost him around $100. I happen to know that the costs for that are around $12k - I had the same a year ago, but as my workplace insurance took care of the bills, I opted to go for a private clinic, as it was faster.
Taxes. Yes, we’ve got them, but we also have relatively good roads, mostly better than what I’ve seen in the US. We have well-trained police force, public fire departments, both trained in specific academies that hand out college level degrees. Ditto for officer training. Cadre army with modern weaponry, well trained active reserve and all that.
Most of us understand all this and pay the taxes gladly. Grumbling goes without saying, but we still pay.
Freedom to do what? Own guns? Join a gun club, request permission and buy guns. Fail a background check? No guns. We had two school shootings - one happened, legislation started getting tightened, the second happened before it went into full effect. Haven’t had a third one yet.
Get to fire guns? Join reservist club, each municipality probably has one or two, some several; they’ll send out polite invitations to weekly or monthly practice sessions to a nearby range.
Carry a gun? Why bother. Nobody else is carrying either, except police officers and other very very rare people - on duty only.
We’re pretty free, actually, and yes, I know the difference between us and the US; we’re better off.
No comments:
Post a Comment