Sweden has one of the highest rates of firearm-related violence in Western Europe, a result of an ever-increasing number of gangs and criminal networks responsible for the high inflow of illegal firearms to Sweden, according to experts.
Despite one of the world’s strictest gun laws, the country still faces significant firearm-related bloodshed, with many experts calling for additional policies to combat the illegal flow of firearms and gang criminality.
According to a 2021 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Serbian pistols, and Yugoslav-era hand grenades are fueling the country’s rising gang violence that is partially due to the legacy of the currently dissolved, so-called “Yugoslav mafia” that dominated Stockholm’s criminal underworld through the 1990s.
Ardavan Khoshnood, a criminologist and a political scientist researching violent crimes and gang violence in Sweden at Lund University, told Anadolu that in Sweden, weapons smuggling is out of control.
According to Khoshnood, hundreds of various types of weapons, including automatic guns, semi-automatic weapons, grenades, and also explosives, get smuggled into the country daily, from various countries, mostly from Eastern Europe, due to high demand by many gangs and criminal networks in Sweden.
“There are some very serious conflicts between these gangs and criminal networks,” and as long as there is such a huge demand, there will be “a huge influx of weapons into the Swedish society,” he added.
Also, Stahle said the country has gone from zero shootings 20 years ago to now hundreds of shootings every year.
Over the past decade, the gun violence in Sweden has been constantly escalating and it is “relatively simple to acquire illegal weapons,” he noted.
Apart from firearms smuggled in from other parts of Europe, the domestic illegal gun market is also to blame, as criminals have discovered that they can buy parts needed to repair and maintain often dysfunctional old weapons in the local stores, “without any control at all,” Stahle stressed.
“A lot of them are from the Cold War era,” or even older than that, he added.