Swedish study on gun violence ignores migration and ethnicity of shooters ━ The European Conservative

A report by the Swedish Council for Crime Prevention (BRÅ), which was commissioned by the government to investigate the increase in gun violence, completely disregards mass migration or the ethnicity or culture of the shooters in its analysis.

Henrik Angerbrandt, one of the authors behind the study, told the news agency Together that the study did not include the background of the perpetrators because this was not considered interesting for the report: “We did not look at the individual level. We did not look at foreign backgrounds and we did not generally examine socio-economic factors.”

Last year, Sweden recorded 363 shooting incidents (including 53 deaths and 109 injuries) – the highest numbers in Europe, in a country that once had the lowest gun crime rate per capita. By contrast, the other three Nordic countries – all of which have had significantly more restrictive migration policies – recorded just six fatal shootings between them in 2023.

While Swedish authorities avoid identifying poorly controlled migration as a cause of increased violent crime, their Danish colleagues are candid about it:

“Sweden is a frightening example of what happens when too little attention is paid to immigration and law enforcement policies,” Danish MP Preben Bang Henriksen told the newspaper Aftonbladet“Neither the conservative nor the social democratic governments have addressed the problem.”

Per Gudmundson, former editor-in-chief of a centre-right daily newspaper SvDcommented on X that

The BRÅ report is clinically free of anything to do with immigration issues. A 100-page overview of gun violence, but no words like “immigrant,” “origin,” “foreign,” “ancestry,” “Somali.” There is no analysis of the suspect registry at all.

Gudmundson – a rather lone critical voice in the Swedish mainstream media – questions why the study completely ignores the immigration perspective, calling it “unreasonable” in light of the fact that other criminologists “have noted that origin has explanatory value.” He continues:

I can’t shake the feeling that BRÅ made a conscious choice. They skipped the hard part of the issue. Unfortunately, this has consequences for the measures that are proposed, and therefore for the benefit to the client (the government!).

The assignment for the study (The rise of gun violence in Sweden) was to “investigate how shifts in norms within the criminal environment may be related to the development of conflicts between and within criminal networks (and) to map the development of gun violence in Sweden since the mid-2000s, when the increase began.” The focus of the research, the report states, should be on

identifying trend breaks, including identifying incidents that may have contributed to the increase or change in the nature of violence, and analyzing what factors may have influenced the shift in norms within the criminal environment.

Apparently the influx of criminal individuals and gangs was not counted among those ‘incidents’ and ‘factors’.

In the 120-page report, the authors identify general shifts in the nature of gun violence in Sweden. A fairly structured and regulated use of guns by hierarchically organized criminal groups in the mid-2000s changed to gun violence associated with neighborhood-based criminal organizations in the 2010s. This shift, the report says, was related to changes in the illegal drug trade, “where territorial control over sales gradually emerged” and the “change in organizational structure” meant that the use of violence was not as strictly regulated as before. While shootings previously involved “leading individuals” and were sanctioned by the gang, they began to involve lower-level gangsters and occurred “on more individual initiatives.”

In the second half of the 2010s, neighborhood groups disintegrated and guns began to be used in personal conflicts and in criminal “businesses.” This is also when Sweden began to see “guns for hire”: criminal groups whose main source of income was contract killings. In the 2020s, the report says,

A new type of perpetrator has emerged: young teenagers with only a weak connection to the instigators. They also do not always have a personal stake in the conflicts connected with the shootings. Compared to previous periods, there seems to have been a devaluation of the status associated with carrying out certain types of shootings, and these are being assigned to very young perpetrators with limited experience in the criminal environment.

As we reported earlier, these ‘child soldiers’ also pose a major problem for neighboring countries.

BRÅ was also tasked with “proposing measures that can help reverse the negative trend.” Measures proposed in the study include increasing the crime-solving rate, “dialogue” and “psychosocial interventions to prevent and combat gang crime among children and young people.”

The Crime Prevention Council BRÅ, a government agency, “works to reduce crime and increase safety in society” by “presenting facts and disseminating knowledge about crime, law enforcement and crime prevention.”