Bombings, shootings and rioting are on the rise in Sweden. We need to talk about why.
Something is rotten in the state of Sweden. Grenade attacks have soared in recent years. Sweden is now the only country other than Mexico in which police record the number of grenade attacks. Explosions in general are on the rise. ‘Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on?’, a bamboozled BBC asked in 2019. In 2020 there were more than 200 explosions and 360 shootings. The murder rate for 2020 was Sweden’s highest in 18 years: 124 people were killed and 39 per cent of the killings involved guns. Sweden is the only country in Europe in which fatal shootings have surged since the year 2000. Even the once Sweden-adoring Guardian has had to admit, with not a little perplexion, that Sweden has gone from having ‘one of the lowest rates of gun violence on the continent to one of the highest in less than a decade’.
