What sets Sweden's school shooting apart

Sweden has suffered its worst mass shooting in living memory. On Tuesday, a 35-year-old gunman went to a community college in the central city of Örebro armed with a firearm. After changing into combat fatigues in one of the school toilets, he launched an attack that left 11 people (including himself) dead and several more critically wounded.

What Sweden witnessed was a form of violence born from cultural atomisation and ennui

As someone who’s been involved, on and off, in the debates surrounding immigration and the new patterns of violence in Sweden, an incident like this appears as a round peg in a square hole. At first, as news of the shooting came out, many people rushed to try and connect this incident to immigration; Sweden’s problems with gun violence are, after all, a long-debated topic. But it quickly became clear that this sort of violence – a lone, isolated gunman, with no criminal record, possessing an actual firearms license – did not seem to fit with the sort of gangland shootings and street executions people have gotten used to.