This is about one of the scariest headlines I have read in a while:

It’s Time for Sweden to Admit Explosions Are a National Emergency

Wait, what?  Just how many explosions are happening in Sweden.

The bomb exploded shortly after 9 a.m. Friday in a blast that ripped through two apartment buildings and could be heard for miles. Twenty-five people suffered cuts and bruises and 250 apartments were damaged. A nearby kindergarten was evacuated. Hospitals jumped into disaster mode. Photos from the scene show rows of demolished balconies and shattered windows. It was ”absolutely incredible” that no one was severely injured, a police spokesperson said.

Holy shit, this just happened?  How come we haven’t heard anything about it?

How are people so casual about the idea that the front was blown off an apartment building in a nation that I keep being told by Democrats is paradise on earth.

It is the kind of news we usually associate with war zones, but this bombing took place in Linköping, a peaceful university town in southern Sweden. Remarkably, it was not the only explosion in the country that day; another, seemingly unrelated, blast was reported in a parking lot in the city of Gothenburg earlier in the morning. Three explosions have been reported in Malmö since Tuesday morning. As of this writing, no arrests have been made.

Holy fuck!  If five explosions happened in the US, we’d be at war and cops would be doing door to door across every urban center in America.

Sweden has experienced a sharp rise in explosions in recent years, predominantly related to conflicts between warring criminal gangs. The use of explosives in the Nordic country is now at a level that is unique in the world for a state not at war, according to police. In response, the government issued a first-ever ”amnesty for explosives” in the fall of 2018, allowing people in possession of such weapons to hand them over to police with immunity. But this didn’t stem the tide: some 50 explosions were reported in the first three months of 2019 alone—an average of more than one every other day and an increase over the same period in 2018, a year that saw a record number of more than three blasts per week.

I am at a total loss here.  This doesn’t sound like the Sweden I keep hearing about.  The nation where gender relations are perfect, where democratic socialism functions exactly the way we are told it should, where social justice has allowed personkind to reach its zenith of equality.

This sounds more like the news from Iraq or Somolia.

While explosives have become a weapon of choice among the country’s gangs, the effects of such violence are hardly confined to criminals. In the past four years, fatalities include a 63-year-old man who unknowingly picked up a hand grenade lying in the street; an 8-year-old boy who was asleep when a hand grenade was thrown into the apartment where he was staying; and a 4-year-old girl killed in a car bombing.

Do the Swedes have some version of the NRA that I am not aware of that makes hand grenade ownership legal in that country?

Where are all these grenades coming from?  Even in the US, we don’t have drive by hand grenades

There has been a corresponding marked escalation in gang-related shootings, which increasingly take place in broad daylight. Sweden had 45 deadly shootings in what police refer to as ”criminal environments” last year, which is an increase by a factor of 10 in one generation. In contrast, neighbouring Norway has less than three.

Damn Swedish NRA!

This can’t be right, Sweden has very strict gun laws.  So much so that a Fudd who wrote for Vox said that “Sweden may have the answer to America’s gun problem.”

So I’m still unsure how all these “responsible hunters” who don’t go around talking about gun rights, living in a country with strict gun control, can cause so many gang shootings and explosions.

Deadly shootings per capita in Sweden are now considerably higher than the European average. And systematic witness intimidation, paired with a code of silence in the country’s socio-economically weak immigrant areas, has made this type of crime difficult for the Swedish legal system to tackle.

That is interesting…

The rise in gang violence and other types of crime—including sexual offenses and a wave of robberies against children—has had far-reaching implications for Swedish society. In a country which boasts ”the world’s first feminist government,” a third of young women now report feeling unsafe going out at night.  A recent survey in the country’s three largest cities showed that safety is now the main priority for Swedes who are looking to buy homes. Crime emerged as a top priority among voters ahead of the election to the European Parliament in May.

I wonder what happened to those Swedish men that caused such a rapid rise in crimes against women and children?

According to the prevailing ideology of the Swedish political establishment, this wave of violence, which is baffling to many European neighbours, should not be happening. A longstanding cornerstone of the country’s political conversation dictates that crime must be understood in socio-economic terms, and that welfare provisions are a cure-all against violence and social unrest. Yet Sweden is one of Europe’s most generous welfare states.

So crime isn’t directly related to poverty, and simply giving people free government money doesn’t make them better.

Instead of seeking refuge in ideological wishful thinking, the Swedish government should focus on reforming a criminal justice system that was built for a more peaceful society. To name but one issue: young criminals receive remarkably soft sentences. For example, a 16-year-old convicted of an execution-style killing at a Stockholm pizza restaurant in 2018 was sentenced to three years in institutional care for young people. The country also has one of the smallest police forces per capita in the EU.

So a soft-on-crime, sympathetic-to-vicious-criminals, feminist government has lost control of its country.  I guess “go woke, go broke” applies to nations as well.

Before any specific issues can be addressed the Swedish government must acknowledge the severity of the matter. In the past few years, the rise in violent crime in Sweden has attracted growing attention from international media. How has the Swedish government responded? By launching an elaborate PR campaign for foreign audiences that plays down the challenges—especially those in the country’s immigrant areas. Nothing will change if the government continues to respond to the reality in the streets with cynical rhetorical spin.

So what have we learned here?

Well, reading between the lines a predominately Muslim immigrant community, mainly from Africa and the Middle East is responsible for the majority of shootings and (probably all) the bombings in the country, as well as the vast majority of rapes and crimes against children.

The Swedish government has gone with the typical Progressive idea that this violence and criminality is the effect of poverty.  That these people are an oppressed underclass and if they are just taken care of from cradle to grave at taxpayer expense, they will live peacefully.

Not just is that not working out, they are throwing grenades at each other and shooting each other with automatic weapons, also slaughtering the sacred cow that strict gun control will make a people less likely to kill each other.

Maybe Vox is right and Sweden may have the answer to America’s gun problem, but not in the way that they think.

Perhaps the lesson is that a minority (in the strictest sense of the word, meaning a small percentage) of the population is responsible for the majority of the crimes.

Furthermore, this minority criminality isn’t driven (predominately) by poverty, but a cultural attitude that encourages feuding, addressing interpersonal grievances with violence, and preying upon the weak.  Including throwing grenades at people and bombing apartment buildings.

Lastly, passing strict gun – or in the case of the UK, knife, gardening tool, hammer, scissors, and drain cleaner – control does not affect the ability of this group to engage in bloody violence.

Maybe the right way to address violent crime isn’t to address the guns (or knives, or drain cleaner) but to address these minority populations and the cultural proclivities for violent feuding.

Also, Sweden, get your shit under control.  There haven’t been this many grenades going off in a Western European nation since the end of WWII.