Serbia offers amnesty for illegal firearms and thousands are reported

Gun owners across Serbia have surrendered thousands of guns as part of an amnesty program aimed at reducing the number of firearms in civilian hands after the country was hit by two mass shootings last week, according to the government.

The shootings, one by a minor armed with his father’s pistols and the other with an illegal firearm, prompted Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, to pledge the “almost complete disarmament” of the country. Gun owners were given a month’s amnesty to surrender illegal guns without penalty pending tougher rules being enacted.

The two shootings left a total of 17 dead and 21 injured. In the first shooting, on May 3, a seventh-grade student killed eight fellow students and a security guard at his school in the Serbian capital Belgrade. The second, a day later, left eight dead in a series of attacks in villages south of Belgrade.

In a statement posted on Instagram, the country’s interior ministry said nearly 6,000 unregistered guns have been handed over to authorities since the amnesty program began on Monday. Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Mr Vucic said more than 9,000 “legal and illegal” guns had been collected, but it was not clear if that number included guns that had been seized or if they had all been handed over voluntarily.

Mr Vucic also said there were 460,537 rounds of ammunition, 884 “various explosive items, 711 of which were bombs or rocket launchers”.

The exact number of weapons in Serbia is difficult to determine, but the weapons handed in this week appear to be only a small fraction of that. At the end of 2017, about 2.7 million firearms were owned by civilians, but less than half were registered with the government, according to The handgun investigation.

Serbia now ranks third in the world for gun ownership, after the United States and Yemen (and tied with Montenegro). It is awash with weapons, many in stockpiles left over from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Other mass shootings around the world have prompted governments to introduce tougher gun laws.

The British government banned semi-automatic weapons in 1987, after a gunman killed 16 people. Small arms were banned in Britain almost a decade later, following a school shooting in 1996. After peaking in 2003 and 2004, firearms offenses in Britain fell by 53 percent in 2011, the government reported.

A 1996 massacre in Australia led to a gun buyback program that took an estimated 20 percent of firearms out of circulation. It also “caused reductions in gun suicides, mass shootings, and female homicide victims,” completed a RAND study.

The Canadian government imposed tougher gun controls after a mass shooting in 1989, as did the German authorities in 2002 and the New Zealand government in 2019.

A prominent exception is the United States, where the right to bear arms is enshrined in the constitution. Despite years of deadly disaster, gun control measures often meet stiff opposition.

Joe Orovic reporting contributed.