Over the last several days, seven people were shot in Sweden. Two of them, a 15-year-old boy and a 45-year-old man, were killed during a mass shooting in Farsta, a town south of the city of Stockholm that falls within the Stockholm region, where four people were shot in total.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the centre-right Moderates, took to Facebook to condemn Sweden’s ongoing scourge of gun crime.
“The situation is extremely serious. According to the police, about 30,000 people are now either in or connected to the criminal gangs. Three new people are added every day. The violence is getting coarser, more indifferent and penetrates further down in age,” Kristersson wrote.
The age of gang members involved in shootings and other violent incidents in Sweden is incredibly low according to reports from earlier this year in January, which stated that the vast majority of those being arrested for gang violence in the Stockholm region, up to 80%, were under 18, with some as young as just 14.
Prime Minister Kristersson promised reforms that could see violent offenders given heftier prison sentences and a policy that could ban them from certain districts and municipalities.
Kristersson also mentioned that “more people must learn the language,” hinting at the fact many of those involved in gun crime and criminal gangs are from migrant backgrounds, something only recently admitted by Swedish police and others in the Swedish establishment.
In 2021, former Gothenburg Police Commissioner Erik Nord directly linked migration and gang crime stating, “It is no longer a secret today that much of the problem of gang and network crime with the shootings and explosions have been linked to migration to Sweden in recent decades.”
In an opinion article for Goteborgs Posten, he noted:
When, like me, you have the opportunity to follow matters at the individual level, you see that virtually everyone who shoots or is shot in gang conflicts originates from the Balkans, the Middle East, North or East Africa.
A later report in early 2022 claimed that as many as 85% of suspects in fatal shooting cases in Sweden came from foreign backgrounds following 2021’s 45 recorded deaths from gun crimes.
The next year’s number of fatal shootings smashed the previous record of 47 deaths that took place in 2021, with 2022 seeing a total of 62 people killed and a total of 390 shooting incidents overall, making Sweden the country within the European Union with the most prolific rates of gun violence, a trend that has been observed since at least 2021.
Sweden’s Minister of Justice Gunnar Strömmer also spoke out strongly about the weekend shooting in Farsta saying, “The police have found 21 empty casings, so there are 21 shots that have gone off. It could potentially have gone even worse. I have talked about this as domestic terrorism.”
“It has been a terrible day with new brutal shootings. We are now mobilizing new resources and new tools to prevent new shootings, to disrupt the financial flow of the criminal gangs and toughen the penalties for the most serious crimes,” he said, echoing the statement from Prime Minister Kristersson.
Sweden’s explosion of gun violence has come despite the county’s relatively strict firearms laws, which largely limit firearms ownership to hunting purposes and target shooting.
Many of the firearms used in Sweden’s epidemic of shootings are not legal to purchase in Sweden at all, including handguns and automatic rifles, and like many of the gang members who wield them, are often imported into the country.
The Balkan region has, for years, been one of the main sources of illegal weapons used in Sweden, with Bosnian prosecutor Goran Glamocanin suggesting in 2018 that Sweden was the largest market in Europe for illegal weapons from the Balkan region, which became awash with weapons following the various Yugoslav wars during the 1990s.
Along with rifles and pistols, Swedish gangs have imported hand grenades to terrorise their enemies. Despite the government putting forth a law in 2017 aimed at halting the illegal import of hand grenades, by this year, only five had been seized, an average of one per year, while 2019 alone saw over 250 explosions.
As the Ukraine war with Russia continues to rage, Swedish authorities have also expressed concern that Ukraine may become another major source of illegal weapons for Swedish gangs, with Inspector Gunnar Appelgren stating last year that there was a “high risk” of weapons entering Sweden from Ukraine.
While Prime Minister Kristersson is promising reform, it remains unclear whether the reforms will deter gang crime as some have pointed out that despite many gang leaders being placed in prison, they are often easily replaced by other gang members.
Christoffer Bohman, a Swedish police officer who resigned earlier this year expressed his views on the issue saying, “As a police officer, I, and my colleagues, have come to dedicate our lives to putting people in jail, but I realize that it matters less that we prosecute more people than ever before if there are ten in line for every person we take away.”
