My colleague Fred Schwarz points me to this Media Blog post he wrote in March, which includes a pertinent bit of info:
According to this list, over the last 10 years, from spring 1999 to spring 2009 — a period that includes the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres — there have been 96 total fatalities from school shootings in the U.S. Compare that with Germany’s 30 fatalities in the two recent incidents, and the German per-capita fatality rate is also higher than ours (though Finland, with 20 fatalities and a population a bit north of 5 million, outdistances the pack by a large margin).
Clearly, Finland and Germany’s economies must be more dog-eat-dog than ours.