After mass shootings in Serbia, few are willing to give up their guns

He learned to shoot with a pistol from his grandfather before attending school, and he fought in three wars as a soldier in the Yugoslav and then Serbian army during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.

Sinisa Janicijevic became such a good shooter that he is regularly invited to weddings in villages around his hometown, Kraljevo, in Central Serbia, to make sure the bride shows up – which traditionally involves shooting an apple that falls into a tree. outside her is placed the house of the family.

The groom is supposed to perform this task, but because he is afraid of going missing, he often calls in a replacement gunner.

Serbia’s deep attachment to guns, and abundance of guns, has been widely cited as explaining successive massacres last month — one at a school in Belgrade, the capital, and another in nearby farming villages — that stunned the nation. , even if gun violence is low. After the killings, President Aleksandar Vucic pledged to tighten gun control laws to enforce “near complete disarmament”.

The two shootings seemed to have little in common other than the youth of the perpetrators; The school shooting by a 13-year-old involved legally registered handguns, the other by a 21-year-old an illegal automatic rifle.

The killings have sparked a nationwide debate about what to do with the country’s large number of guns — and whether that’s the problem.

The picture is much more complicated than that of simple gun control. Serbia already has some of the strictest restrictions in Europe. But poor enforcement has left a large number of guns illegally in private hands – the ones Mr. Vucic is mainly after – and it is unlikely that many Serbs, whether gangsters using them for work or villagers who cherish old family guns, will hand over. over them, experts say.

During a series of major street protests in Belgrade, protesters have accused the government of focusing on gun control to avoid addressing deeper and more intractable social problems, particularly among young people.

Ivan Ljubojevic, a 47-year-old manager who took part in a protest on Saturday, mocked the government’s crackdown as “a distraction from our real problems”.

A day earlier, Mr. Vucic, who accuses the opposition of exploiting the mass shooting for political ends, has a smaller gathering of his own supporters.

Mr Janicijevic, the veteran, who is also an avid hunter, said he felt gun control laws were too strict and the real problem was a pervasive “culture of violence” exacerbated by social media.

He noted that there had been no mass shootings in Serbia in the 1990s, when gun laws were relatively lax and rarely enforced, and the country was flooded with weapons from the wars in neighboring Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.

All automatic weapons are banned in Serbia, as are most semi-automatic weapons. A criminal conviction for a traffic accident or other offenses makes legal possession of weapons impossible. People who manage to obtain a gun permit for reasons of personal safety must apply for a separate permit if they want to take guns out of their homes.

To obtain permits for his two shotguns, Mr. Janicijevic had to undergo psychiatric and medical tests, be vetted by a state hunting association and wait months for police officers to question his neighbors about whether they had seen any signs of aggressive behavior. He must keep his weapons locked in a cupboard, separate from his ammunition.

Instead of tightening these already tight controls, Mr Janicijevic said, the government should focus on controlling social media.

There is no evidence that social media or TV viewing habits contributed to last month’s shootings. But Serbs criticizing Mr Vucic have paid close attention to the fact that the second gunman, according to villagers who knew him, greatly admired Kristijan Golubovic, a convicted drug dealer and thief who appeared in reality shows on Pink, an outspoken pro-government channel , and as a guest on a second wedding station, Happy.

After killing eight people in a shooting that started outside a schoolyard, the gunman fled to Kragujevac, a town with a large arms factory and, according to residents, full of guns.

“You’d pass out if you knew how many people here have guns,” says Vlada Peric, a burly war veteran who works as a bodyguard in Kragujevac.

He blamed American influence, largely spread through social media, for turning Serbia’s folkloric attachment to guns into mass murder. Young people, he said, “just want to be modern and follow modern trends,” including school shootings.

But Serbia, he added, “is not Texas.”

One of the main targets of the protesters’ anger has been television channels such as Pink and Happy which, in between highly flattering coverage of Mr Vucic, broadcast brutally violent reality shows that sometimes feature convicted criminals such as Mr Golubovic.

Despite Serbia’s strict restrictions on gun ownership, criminals have no problem arming themselves, said Predrag Petrovic, a researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy.

“It’s not about how strict our rules are, but how they are implemented,” said Mr Petrovic. Rules imposed with great force on hunters and other regular gun owners, he added, are rarely enforced by friends of the government or organized crime groups.

“The law is a one-way street: ordinary people follow it and gangsters just ignore it,” said Aco Filipovic, a café owner in Kraljevo who said he gave up his gun because of the paperwork and cost of getting a permit after the laws. were tightened in 2015.

The government has reported that since it declared an amnesty for illegal possession from gun owners who surrender their guns in early May, it has collected more than 50,000 guns and explosives, less than two percent of the estimated total number of firearms in private hands.

With billboards across the country urging citizens to “turn in guns,” stores selling guns for hunting and personal security are struggling.

Jandrija Martic, the general manager of Royal Wolf, a registered arms dealer in Kraljevo, said sales had fallen by about 95 percent since the mass shootings.

“Maybe I should close my business,” he said.

While the crackdown has cooled the legal market for new guns, many wonder if it has caused many people to surrender the guns, especially illegal guns, they already owned. A previous fundraising campaign in 2015 quickly got out of hand.

Nebojsa Pantelic, a member of the security team who guarded Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic when he was killed by a sniper outside his office in Belgrade in 2003, said people in his village were unlikely to be affected by the amnesty offer.

“Everyone here has guns, but no one is handing them over,” he said. Many of the weapons are old family heirlooms and old shotguns.

Accurate figures on how many guns, both legal and illegal, there are in Serbia are hard to come by. The government releases only fragmentary figures. A 2018 report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based group, estimated the total number of civilian-owned guns in Serbia at 2.7 million and ranked the country third for gun ownership per capita. along with Montenegro, another former part of Yugoslavia. They were behind only the United States and Yemen, a country at war.

Aaron Karp, an associate professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and the report’s lead author, admitted that due to vague official data from Serbia, the number is “a best effort,” adding: “The method is solid but it is not a reliable number.”

Whatever the actual figure, Serbia has one relatively low murder rate, ranked next to Sweden, although a string of gruesome murders by organized crime groups has given the country an unsavory reputation for extreme violence.

Well-documented ties between the government and organized crime, including a notoriously violent group led by Veljko Belivuk, have also undermined confidence in Vucic’s promises to take up arms and contributed to a climate of fear. that only increases the hunger for guns. Tensions over Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, have fueled those feelings, he said.

“Vucic is constantly telling people that we are on the brink of war with Kosovo and sending the message that his political opponents are working for foreign interests,” he said. “Serbia is ruled by fear.”