One Dead in Swedish School Sword Attack

Yesterday afternoon, an 18-year-old man walked into Brinell High School in the small town of Fagersta, Sweden, armed with a sword, killed a 17-year-old girl, and left three others injured before police shot him in the leg and dragged him into custody. Two boys, ages 12 and 17, were seriously hurt, one badly enough to need emergency surgery. A third victim’s condition still hasn’t been made public.

The school had just reopened after summer break, and for a lot of these kids it was their literal first day back.Somewhere out there, this sword-wielding idiot spent his whole summer giddy, knowing exactly which day he was going to do this.

Local media say the attacker was a former student at the school with a prior conviction for assault, which tells you the warning signs were already sitting in a file somewhere before he ever picked up a sword.

Investigators are also digging through a month-old TikTok account that’s since been taken down, one that AFP actually got eyes on before it disappeared. The last post on it was a photo of a sword, uploaded about twenty minutes before he walked into the school.

Earlier posts referenced prior school attacks and, more tellingly, Anders Breivik. For anyone who doesn’t recognize that name, Breivik is the Norwegian who in 2011 set off a bomb in Oslo and then shot seventy-seven people dead, most of them teenagers, at a summer camp on the island of Utoya.

He’s become something like a patron saint for a certain flavor of lowlife online extremist, the kind of guy other losers reference the way normal people reference their favorite band.

Sweden had a previous sword attack back in 2015, at the Kronan School in Trollhättan. That attacker, Anton Lundin Pettersson, killed three people in the end, a teaching assistant and two students, one of whom died months later from his injuries.

Pettersson wore a homemade approximation of a WWII German helmet, carried a sword, and turned out to be motivated by garden-variety Nazi racism dressed up as internet edgelording. He was shot dead at the scene before he ever had to answer for it in a courtroom.

Fagersta isn’t a beat-for-beat repeat of that story, but the shape of it rhymes uncomfortably well. A young guy, a sword, a school, a costume of some kind, and a trail of moldy internet breadcrumbs pointing toward hate.

Police haven’t announced a motive yet, and to be fair to them, it’s barely been a day. But between the TikTok tribute to Breivik and the obvious echo of Trollhattan, I don’t think we’re looking at a kid who just happened to like swords. I think this is a TCC-inspired attack.

For readers who haven’t run into that acronym before, TCC stands for True Crime Community. They’re a loose and mostly online subculture that treats mass killers like Breivik as celebrities.

It started as Tumblr blogs run by teenagers fawning over Columbine shooters and ballooned from there into a whole ecosystem of forums and Discord servers where guys like Breivik and Pettersson get turned into murder groupie scrapbooks.

I mentioned this back in 2015 too, the ones I figured would already be adding Pettersson to their little tumblrs, and here we are a decade later watching some new kid apparently do his own homework in that same blood-soaked fandom.

What gets me every time is how little imagination any of these guys ever bring to the table. This one didn’t invent a new grievance or a new method; he just picked up somebody else’s sword and somebody else’s hero and restaged a script that’s over a decade old at this point.

Breivik gave him a saint, Pettersson gave him a blueprint, and TikTok gave him an audience for the twenty minutes before he needed it. Strip away the costume and the platform, and what you’re left with is just another entitled kid who wanted to be somebody and figured killing children was the fastest way there.

He’s in custody now instead of a body bag, which at least means somebody can ask him why, eventually, in a courtroom instead of a police statement. But whatever answer he gives, I promise you it won’t be original.

It never is.

(Sources)