Good news people! Its not America this time!...
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/22/450802875/sword-wielding-man-kills-1-injures-several-more-at-swedish-school
stricter sword control are necessary to stop a repeat of this tragedy...
anyway wtf Sweden? Swords? Really?
From
my post in the Europe thread:
There's been an attack on a Swedish school in Trollhättan. A man wielding what witnesses describe as a sword and police call "several knife-like objects" killed one man and hurt one man and two children. He attacked the police when they arrived on the scene and was incapacitated by a gun shot and survived.
The perpetrator has been identified and has been confirmed to be a man in his 20's, but the police is not sharing his identity or background until they've had time to search through his residence and other locations of interest. He was described as being masked at the time, but it has not been confirmed what kind of mask it was.
There's bound to be lots of speculation of the nature of the attack on the internet but so far it has not been confirmed whether he had political motives, or if it was personal drama, or something like a postal/school shooting situation.
As far as I know this is still the situation (but I haven't been following it for the last 30 minutes), except the perpetrator and one of the children passed away, but the other wounded are stable. Apparently after stabbing one man at the entrance he went door to door between classrooms and cut whoever opened the door, but he did not hurt the rest of the people in those rooms, it seems.
I thought those guys used axes.
Nope, not if they had a choice. Viking era Norsemen preferred spears and swords (but only rich people could afford swords). They fought mainly in shieldwall formation-based warfare and strategy and it's pretty dumb to be stuck with an axe at the opposite of a guy with spear. Axes was not uncommon per se, but neither was it the weapon-of-choice.
Funnily enough, the hafted axe so attributed to "vikings" probably was more popular by anglo-saxons, Irishmen/Norse-Gaelish, and other areas where Norse had hung around/settled than with the Scandinavians themselves. It was also from those areas that the design spread in use throughout Europe.