According to a recent report based on open-source data, funded by the European Union, the rates of lethal and non-lethal shootings in Sweden are among the highest in Western Europe. The difference in the rate of non-lethal shootings is especially high, and the victims of shootings in Sweden are considerably younger than victims in other countries. The report claims that the rates are related to the high numbers of criminal gangs in Sweden (Savona and Mancuso 2017a). According to the report, media sources revealed 440 lethal and non-lethal shootings in Sweden from 2010 to 2015, in a population of about 10 million. The corresponding numbers in countries of similar population size, such as Belgium (11.3 million), Greece (10.8 million), Portugal (10.3 million) and Austria (8.7 million), were 196, 251, 240 and 163, respectively (Savona and Mancuso 2017b). This implies that the rate of firearm-perpetrated violence in Sweden is comparatively high. However, given that the report is based on media reports, there is need for both a more reliable national verification and of cross-national comparisons of gun violence in Sweden. In homicide research a more straight-forward way to examine the question of homicide rates that circumvents the problems of legal definitions, recording practices and different clearance rates of mortality data is to count the actual numbers of dead bodies (e.g. thru cause-of-death registries) (Aebi and Linde 2012; Estrada 2005; UNODC 2013). However, the reliability and validity of such data has also been questioned (e.g. Rosenberg 1989; Mathers et al. 2005). Therefore, several researchers have conducted studies to examine the validity of cause-of-death statistics, as well (e.g. Bhalla et al. 2010). The study by Bhalla et al. report that the quality of data from the WHO cause-of-death registry varied considerably and that only 20 countries could provide high quality and reliable data. In short, it is well-known that the study of trends in crime over time and place is problematic. However, it is also known that homicide is probably is less sensitive to biases than many other types of crime.

The Global Trend of Gun Violence

The rates of lethal gun violence decrease in most countries that are not at war (UNODC 2013), and several countries report a decrease in lethal gun violence in recent years, including the U.S. (1990 to 2011; Wintemute 2015), Germany (1995 to 2010; Linde 2017), South Africa (2001 to 2005; Matzopoulos et al. 2014), Australia (1979 to 2013; Chapman et al. 2016), Jordan (1990 to 2000; Shotar et al. 2016) and Canada (1974 to 2008; Langmann 2012). On the other hand, some countries report no change in lethal gun violence, such as Finland (1990 to 1999; Mäkitie and Pihlajamäki 2002), Greenland (1985 to 2010; Christensen et al. 2016) and Chile (2000 to 2012; Otzen et al. 2015), while there are reports of increasing lethal gun violence in Brazil (1980 to 2010; Murray et al. 2013). In addition to a decrease in lethal gun violence there are reports of decreasing rates of non-lethal gun violence from the U.S. (1993 to 2012; Fowler et al. 2015) and Ireland (1996–2009; Lee 2011), while there has been no change in Denmark (1991–2009; Luef et al. 2016) and Finland (1990–2003; Mattila et al. 2006). In England and Wales, both lethal and non-lethal gun violence increased from 1998 to 2004 (summarized in Hales et al. 2006), but rates of gun violence, including lethal gun violence, have since fallen substantially according to statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS 2014). Thus, excluding countries and settings at war and a few other exceptions, there is consistent evidence of decreasing gun violence in many different countries of the globe.

The Trend of Gun Violence in Sweden

The few existing scientific reports on violent crime trends in Sweden show that since the early 1990s there has been an overall decrease in intimate partner homicides (Caman et al. 2017), child homicides (Hedlund et al. 2016), homicides by individuals with psychosis (Sturup and Lindqvist 2014), homicide-suicide cases (Regoeczi et al. 2016) and alcohol-related homicides (Granath 2011). Previous research has also reported that gun modus was the strongest risk factor for not clearing a homicide case (Sturup et al. 2015). In Swedish statistics, a crime is considered to be cleared when the offender is prosecuted (National Council for Crime Prevention 2014). However, in Swedish homicide research a homicide is considered to be cleared when the offender is convicted in court (according to the highest court ruling of the case) or cleared by exceptional means, which means that the police are hindered from taking conviction measures due offender suicide or that the offender is too young (<15 years old) to be criminally responsible (Granath and Sturup 2018). This is a considerably more restrictive definition compared to many other countries, where a case often is considered to be cleared when the offender is arrested (whether the offender is later acquitted or prosecuted), so it is somehow troublesome to compare Swedish homicide clearance rates to other juridical settings. A recent paper reports that the clearance rate in firearm-perpetrated homicide in Sweden has decreased from about 95% in the early 1990s to 50% in the early 2010s (Granath and Sturup 2018). Furthermore, a newly published short communication on the Swedish city of Malmö suggests that the increase in gun-violence is due to a changing modus operandi of criminal networks characterized by increasing gun use and easy access to guns (Khoshnood 2017). It has also been reported that guns are often used in gang homicides in Sweden (Khoshnood and Väfors Fritz 2017). It can also be noted that in Europe overall, 13% percent of homicides are committed with guns (UNODC 2013), compared to 35% in present-day Sweden (National Council for Crime Prevention 2018), indicating a comparably higher rate of gun violence in Sweden. This increase is also in line with the 52% increase in the proportion of firearm homicides in Sweden between the periods 2005–2010 to 2011–2016, as reported by the Small Arms Survey (McEvoy and Hideg 2017). This is exceeded only by the increase in Israel (ibid.).

A government report on shootings in Sweden in 2006 and 2014, respectively, noted an overall 20% increase in all types of shootings, with and without (injured) victims, and a 50% increase in shootings leading to either injuries or death (National Council for Crime Prevention 2015a). A shooting was about five times more likely to occur in an area officially labeled as a socially vulnerable area (LUA and URBAN15), and in practice the increase in shootings was limited to these areas, with only non-significant changes in per capita rates for the rest of the country. The official definition of socially vulnerable areas are based on levels of unemployment, social benefits and school results and are meant to capture the most disadvantaged urban neighborhoods (National Council for Crime Prevention 2015a).

Research on the U.S shows that urban gun violence is concentrated in small geographical areas (Weisburd et al. 2004; Ratcliffe and Rengert 2008) and, as an example, during the period 1980 to 2008, 50% of all gun violence in Boston occurred in 3% of the streets (Braga et al. 2010). A recent study reported equally strong concentrations of gun violence in the three largest cities in Sweden between 2011 and 2015. There were 938 shootings in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö, resulting in 348 killed or injured (79 victims were killed in 71 lethal incidents, while 355 victims were injured in 316 incidents) during the period (these areas had approximately 4.3 million inhabitants; Sturup et al. 2017). During the same time period, Denmark as a whole (with approximately 5.7 million inhabitants) had 160 shootings resulting in 40 cases with injury (Grip and Anthony 2017). Sturup et al. further report a near-repeat relationship between shootings, with a significantly increased risk for a new shooting within 500 m and 3 days from a shooting. In addition to the concentration of gun violence there also been a dramatic increase in the use of detonated hand grenades in Sweden, concentrated to the same areas as the shootings, from about one or two cases per year in the early 2010 to almost 40 in 2016 (Sturup et al. in review).

An EU-funded study on homicide in Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland in 2003 to 2006 reports that an equal share of homicides in Sweden and Finland are committed by guns (17% vs. 18%), however the proportion was considerably higher in the Netherlands (35%; National Council for Crime Prevention 2015b). With regard to clearance, the clearance rate in Sweden was 86%, which is considerably lower than the 98% reported in Finland (there was no information on clearance in 26% of the Dutch cases), although comparison of clearance rates should be done with caution. It should be noted, that the share of all homicides committed with guns in Sweden has increased since the late 1990s, and is now somewhat above 35% (National Council for Crime Prevention 2018) and that the clearance rate has decreased considerably (Granath and Sturup 2018).

This Study

It is advisable to identify the type of crime-related problem in question before trying to implement social policies (Goldstein 1990). In that vein, policy makers and law enforcement officials need to have an accurate understanding of the problem in order to be able to take appropriate measures against increasing gun violence among males. The aim of this study is to use administrative data to validate findings based on media reports on the high levels of gun violence in contemporary Sweden. Based on the review above, we hypothesized that: