Antti might seem like a mild-mannered Koreanist, but you’ve got to be careful around those Finns, apparently:
According to the latest Small Arms Survey, released in Geneva on Tuesday, Finland has 56 firearms for every 100 people, making it the world’s third most armed country in the world behind the United States and Yemen, where the respective figures are 90 and 61.
As CA points out, most of those weapons are hunting rifles (which, I take it, in some parts of the US could be AK-47s), but silencers are legal, “with the argument being it reduces noise pollution.”
On a related note, although stats are lacking, it’s widely believed that Finland is the world’s second largest exporter of chippy stick-wielding hockey players behind Sweden.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Valmet makes outstanding weapons which, as you might expect work very well in the cold.
Interestingly enough, given my AK-47 “hunting rifle” crack, the Valmet Petra hunting rifle apparently is an AK-47 variant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rk_62
I also noticed this on the Wikipedia page on Valmet:
Finnish war reparations to the Soviet Union… now that’s just obnoxious.
Well… the Russian 7.62mm short round was designed to stop men, not deers. Plus, it doesn’t have a lot of range, which is important when you are hunting for medium game, which is what I’d expect the woods of Finland to have.
“…Finnish war reparations to the Soviet Union… now that’s just obnoxious….”
300 million dollars US according to the terms of the Moscow Armistice of Sept 1944:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Armistice
and as ratified by the Finnish portion of the Paris Peace Treaties signed Feb 1947:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.....es%2C_1947
Living up to the national stereotype of sobriety and indsutriousness, types, the Finns promptly got busy and paid off the entirety of the debt by 1952:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.....I#Post-war
USA! USA!
“On a related note, although stats are lacking, it’s widely believed that Finland is the world’s second largest exporter of chippy stick-wielding hockey players behind Sweden.”
Sounds accurate to me.
To continue Paul H’s post a bit further:
1) I remember hearing claims that Finland was the only country that actually paid 100% of the war reparations.
2) Some older Finns claim that Finland is the only country that did not regain the ownership of the areas that were occupied by the Ruskies/winning side of the WWII.
Well, then, I suggest you put down the karjalanpiirakka and get moving on taking that land back. Petsamo or bust!
A co-blogger here I won’t name might disagree. As he once said, “The AK was designed to take down large mammals.”
Actually, Finland paying war reparations to the USSR was obscene, though it did make since. It was, after all, the USSR who invaded Finland. There were even Finnish Jews who joined the Waffen SS to fight the Russians in revenge for the 1939 invasion. Lauri Tornii (US Special Forces Captain Larry Thorne) specifically joined the U.S. Army in hopes of seeing Russians in his sights again.
The standings in Northeastern Europe in the beginning of September 1994:
1. Soviet Union
2. Finland
We were lucky enough to finish even second, so I guess war reparations were not really an option, or, we were not in a position to refuse their offer. Note that the reparations were a result of the 1941-44 war, which started when there were 200,000 German troops in Finland at the time when German started the attack on Russia. The earlier 1939-40 war is a different matter, the question of the attacker was clear, so I guess it’d been too outragous to demand reparations, and land grab was just enough for them.
By the way, quite a convincing case has been made that the steady delivery of good-quality war preparation products was a good motive for the Soviets not to try to turn us communist too eagerly…
I have not heard of such cases, and that’d been quite extreme. A quick browsing of the list of Finnish SS-Waffen volunteers shows only Finnish and Swedish-language names, and some Germans placed in the platoons. Finnish Jews did participate in WW2 in the Finnish army, and three of them were awarded the Iron Cross, but they refused to accept it.
Oh, this was about guns. I don’t have any, but my grandfather had at least four. During my military service the most interesting device that I shot with was most definitely the Suomi (“Finland”) submachine gun, modeled in the uppermost picture by by a later president Koivisto, who served under Lauri Törni. It’s kind of a legendary piece of iron (and wood), you couldn’t help wondering where it had been and what had been done with it 45 years earlier.
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