How Sweden's youth homes nurtured killers, creating Europe's gun crime capital
How Sweden's youth homes nurtured killers, creating Europe's gun crime capital
The killer was only 14 and had lived in youth homes as a ward of the authorities since he was eight.
A year ago, a gang helped the boy escape, put him up in a hotel and gave him cannabis, food and new clothes. Six days later, gang members told him it was time to repay them for their kindness. They had a job for him.
Together with another youth, the boy, who as a juvenile cannot be identified, shot dead a 33-year-old Hells Angels biker. He was convicted by a court which described the case as a gangland contract killing.
As he was too young to be sentenced, he was handed back to social services and sent to another youth home.
Sweden has long prided itself on one of the world's most generous social safety nets, with a state that looks after vulnerable people at all stages of life.
But these days it also has another distinction: by far the highest per capita rate of gun violence in the EU. Last year 55 people were shot dead in 363 separate shootings in a country of just 10 million people. By comparison, there were just six fatal shootings in the three other Nordic countries - Norway, Finland and Denmark - combined.
daaamn this gang applied the same old receipt : The french word for murderer is "assassin" that comes from the haschischins sect (XIe century). The "old men from the mountain" (leader) gave young mens a taste of paradise (cannabis, food, shelter, maybe girls) then sent them to kill someone.
So he killed a dude And they sent him back to the youth home? Are they just stupid or what?
The kid is a victim.
And in Sweden what in the US would be called a "juvenile detention center" would fall under the term of "youth home". He wasn't returned to the same one.
I don't think they're exactly leaving him unguarded, being underage, there isn't another type of facility suited for legally incarcerating him. These facilities essentially double as juvie and orphanages.
Mixing kids who are simply in government care with ones that are violent, was never a good idea though. These two systems should be separate, because it's now turning the former into the latter.
According to accounts for this story from eight sources including a former gang member, several youth home workers, prosecutors and criminologists, the homes have turned into recruiting grounds for gangs, who use them to enlist killers too young to be jailed.
Gangs have essentially found a loophole for legal murder. Get a child to do it.
They're the ones masterminding this shit. It's not like these actual children, with government rooves over their heads, are taking on contract killing to make ends meet.
Mixing kids who are simply in government care with ones that are violent, was never a good idea though.
That's the issue here. There's a huge difference between the kids in state care because they are orphaned and the kids who get sent to juvenile detention centers or even what we call in the US "alternative schooling."
It's the system that's the problem. It was built for a society with a very homogenous and pacifist culture profile. That society no longer exists.
The majority in Sweden is going through a rather rude awakening right now and our systems are going to break a lot whilst our politicians struggle to bring them in line with our new reality.
Not every nation follows America's hardline view of kids and crime.
See I hear you except when it becomes full on straight up murder.
And the other commenter talked about how those homes (more like facilities I have learned) the kid is in are recruitments from local gangs to get kids to kill people and go unjailed.
Maybe they shouldn't take America's hard-line view on kids and crime but I'd say the soft view they are using now isn't working very well.
And so what this kid grows up into an adult and then just gets to go back into the world, having killed someone who was innocent because a gang told him too?
Sounds like its a great policy.
Sounds like that gang is doing exactly what countries do, except they're smaller and therefore wrong while the country is right. It's all relative to the size of your steeple.
I dunno about you but the state that I live in has never asked me to go kill hells angels because they gave me some social care money at one point.
Pffft no way, sweden doesn't have gun crime because only american laws can do a gun crime, impossible without it. Those swedes don't know how to build anything and there isn't a single machine shop or black market dealer anywhere outside of the US!
Hang on I'm being passed an update...
It seems that machine shops actually exist everywhere and bad people can indeed get things illegally, or even legally if they haven't been caught being bad yet. Man who'da thunk it? I could've sworn that "if we had gun laws like yurop" it would solve all our problems 600,000,000 unregistered guns be damned.
As he was too young to be sentenced
Check it out, the same logic that let Cruz walk free on the over 40 calls made about him before he shot up Parkland. Maybe charging murderous children is actually a good way to keep them from buying guns as adults which is much harder with a record in America, I can only imagine the same would apply to swedes, and then whatever senior members will have to get guns illegally (which tbh isn't that hard but at least you can say you tried.)
Sweden, which is currently experiencing an outbreak of gum violence, has 62 fatal shootings in 2022. To put that in perspective, adjusted for population, the equivalent would be 2000 shootings in the states.
Actual number of fatal, non-suicide shootings in the states? 20000.