Three people were killed overnight in separate incidents in Sweden as deadly violence linked to a feud between criminal gangs escalated.
Late Wednesday, an 18-year-old man was shot dead in a Stockholm suburb. Hours later, one man was killed and another was wounded in a shooting in Jordbro, south of the Swedish capital.
Early Thursday a woman in her 20s died in an explosion in Uppsala, west of Stockholm. The blast, which damaged five houses, is being treated by the police as a murder. Swedish media said the woman who died was likely not the intended victim and that the target was the house next door.
Swedish broadcaster SVT noted that the two fatal shootings bring the death toll from gun violence in September to 11, making it the deadliest month for shootings since police started keeping statistics in 2016.
While the trend is horrible for my beloved country with crime increasing year over year which is very fucked we need to keep perspective. Sweden has a population of almost 11 million. NY 9 or so. Sweden a given month 2-11 homicides, NY around 30. And there are far worse cities out there.
We need to get crime down for sure however, we can't let this become the new normal.
I think it's not really the volume that's worrisome as much as the relatively fast evolution.
Yeah exactly it's a very concerning trend
Yeah, even with gang violence sweden is crazy safe, safer than any US city or even town I can think of.
It's so safe people being killed is world news.
It's almost like strict drug laws are counter productive, and that prohibition gives space for the most violent gangs to thrive
It's also possible that a large number of murders go undetected. I'm pretty sure there's a serial killer operating around Trondheim that the police seem to be unaware of. And about 15 years ago there was one in Bergen.
What makes you think that?
They're the serial killer.
I was in both places for some of the time it was going on but not all of the time.
Bergen had a lot of missing persons posters go up for a while and they were all blonde men in their early twenties. I haven't seen missing persons posters anywhere else in Norway and there aren't any in Bergen now.
Trondheim has a lot of drownings. More than Bergen which has a longer coastline and a higher population than Trondheim. And despite the non white population of Trondheim being less than 10% of the total they make up about 90% of the drownings.
Thanks for putting things into perspective. However, I'm unsure how much sense it makes to compare a country with a city. I guess social dynamics change a bit when population density rises. It's easier to find groups for fringe activities in cities.
Sure, the Stockholm Region had 38 murders last year. Laredo, Texas, reportedly a rather safe, small, US town of 250,000 had 13 murders. But Region Stockholm is around 10 times that size. So 130 vs 38.
If we instead compare to Malmö which is the second worst region but much smaller than Stockholm, roughly like Laredo it's 13 for Laredo and 5 for Malmö.