A heinous crime committed in Sweden has once again made international news. On Tuesday, three people were murdered in central Uppsala while inside a barbershop. A 16-year-old suspect has since been detained. In February, 10 people were shot dead at a school campus in the city of Örebro.

In a way, both of these incidents have contributed to an image of Sweden as a fundamentally broken society, one that is overwhelmed and increasingly incapable of dealing with the effects of immigration and social anomie. There is more than a grain of truth in this telling, but the reality is far more muddled than most people appreciate. There are real and serious problems, of course, but these problems have a nasty habit of not lining up with many of the convenient narratives which are popular on both the Left and the Right.

For a start, it’s useful to point out that the crude homicide rate in Sweden sits around 1.1 homicides per 100.000 people. This isn’t particularly outstanding for a wealthy Northern European country, but it is still a very low murder rate. The number is deceptive, however. The spectacular gun violence for which Sweden has become infamous is not evenly distributed across the population. Almost invariably, both the perpetrators and the victims of such violence are immigrants, and usually second-generation immigrants at that.

One can contrast this state of affairs with Sweden’s neighbour, Finland. Finland has a higher homicide rate than Sweden in crude terms, yet lacks the latter country’s problems with immigrant gang violence. Ironically, this produces a situation where many Swedes and Finns alike feel that Finland is safer and more stable, even though the actual risk of dying violently is higher.

This is the true problem festering in Sweden today. Far from being a society on the verge of turning into something out of a Mad Max film, Sweden is home to two parallel universes which only rarely intersect.

The problem isn’t that Sweden is becoming more dangerous for Swedes — the empirical numbers clearly do not bear this theory out. Instead, and perhaps more critically, Sweden is becoming increasingly uncertain and uncomfortable. The issue of gang violence doesn’t loom so large because it’s a return to an older, more brutish chapter of history; in fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. Like the rapid ageing of societies such as South Korea or Japan, the real source of angst here is the feeling of being cut adrift without a map for the future.

This sense of anomie is possibly even more acute within immigrant suburbs themselves. Swedish gun violence is usually perpetrated by second-generation immigrants whose parents are as powerless to transmit their own culture to their children as Swedish society seems to be when it comes to assimilating them into the majority culture.

Deindustrialisation, a loss of collective meaning, and rapidly collapsing birth rates are widespread problems across the West; Sweden is far from unique in this regard. But in South Korea or Japan or Singapore, the ability to focus those worries around one group or one issue is more limited. Though nobody here would ever admit it, in a way many Swedes are secretly grateful for this kind of dramatic and macabre gangland violence. As terrible and shocking as the situation is, one is left wondering: if it weren’t actually there, would we then have to invent it?

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Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden

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