Sweden has just broken the sad annual record for fatal shootings with the death on Thursday of a person shot dead in Kristianstad (South), the 48th victim since the beginning of the year.
According to police statistics, this latest fatal shooting brought the number of people fatally shot in 2022 to 48, meaning Sweden broke a new annual record.
Earlier this week, Swedish police chief Anders Thornberg warned that this number is likely to increase even further before the end of the year.
“It looks like we’re going to break the record this year,” said officer Mikael Lind, estimating that if this continues at the same rate, “we’ll have around 60 fatal shootings.”
“If it ends up being such a large increase, that would be very unusual,” said Manne Gerell, a criminologist at Malmö University, saying it’s “worrying that it’s increasing so much in such a short period”.
As of September 1 this year, 273 shootings have taken place in Sweden, compared to 344 for the whole of 2021 and 379 for the whole of 2020.
A report by the Crime Prevention Council (Brå), presented last spring, showed that the Scandinavian kingdom, compared to 22 countries in Europe, was the only one with an upward trend in fatal shootings.
The upward trend in lethal gun violence in Sweden began in the early 2000s, but took off in 2013 and has continued to rise ever since.