Why even gun-shy Sweden has to deal with mass-shootings

One of those things that never happens has happened again: There was a horrific school massacre in a place that has gun laws more like the ones American progressives would prefer — Sweden, in this case, where 10 died by gunfire this past week.Americans think of mass killings as an American problem and a relatively new one, beginning with the Columbine episode in 1999.But that isn’t the case at all.

What changed in the late 1990s was not American violence — which has certainly spiked — but American media: Thanks to the emergence of online media, we consume a lot more news (and disinformation and conspiracy theories) than we used to. And while our country is an outlier when it comes to the frequency of mass-killings, Americans are far from alone in enduring this plague. The facts may surprise you. The worst school massacre in US history was not at Columbine or Newtown or Parkland, as horrifying as those episodes were.The worst was at a school in the United States back in 1927 in Bath, Mich.

Guns were not a factor: The killer, a failed politician, used explosives — and 38 children, along with six adults, died. US history is full of massacres that are all but forgotten, sometimes because of who the victims were (the 1921 massacre of African Americans in Tulsa has only recently re-emerged in the public consciousness) or because they seem to belong to a forgotten world (as many as 140 were killed by Mormon militiamen at Mountain Meadows, Utah, in 1857). The Columbine massacre we talk about wasn’t even the first to be called the “Columbine massacre”—that happened in 1927 when striking coal miners at the Columbine Mine in the ironically named town of Serene, Colo., were shot with machine guns by police acting as company goons.A Camden, NJ, man killed 13 people back in 1947.

Eleven members of a family were murdered at a family reunion in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1975. Americans are, as a rule, more violent than our European cousins — not only when arme...