Serbia Offers Amnesty for Illegal Firearms, and Thousands Are Collected

The Serbian authorities have collected 1000’s of weapons in a sweeping marketing campaign to scale back the variety of firearms within the fingers of civilians within the week after two mass shootings shocked the nation, officers stated Friday.

More than 9,000 unlawful and authorized weapons have been collected, based on Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, who referred to as the trouble “a great step forward for a safer environment for our children” and “all our people,” at a news convention on Friday.

“Some people say it’s not the gun that shoots the bullet but a man,” he stated. “But if that man doesn’t have a gun, the evil in his head can’t do any harm.”

Mr. Vucic didn’t specify if all of the weapons had been handed over voluntarily or if some had been seized.

The Interior Ministry stated in an announcement on Thursday that nearly 6,000 unregistered weapons had been surrendered to the authorities because the begin of an amnesty program this week.

The two shootings, one by a minor and the opposite involving an unlawful firearm, prompted Mr. Vucic to vow the “almost complete disarmament” of the nation and introduce a one-month interval for gun homeowners to give up unlawful weapons with out penalty forward of the enactment of extra stringent laws.

Mr. Vucic additionally stated that 460,537 rounds of ammunition and 884 “various explosive items, of which 711 are bombs or rocket launchers,” had additionally been taken in by the authorities.

A complete of 17 individuals have been killed and 21 injured within the two shootings. In the primary, on May 3, a seventh grader ​killed eight fellow college students and a safety guard at his college within the Serbian capital, Belgrade. In the second, a day later, eight have been killed in a collection of assaults in villages south of Belgrade.

Mr. Vucic proposed quite a lot of measures after the shootings, together with a two-year moratorium on new gun licenses and enhanced surveillance of taking pictures ranges.

Over the previous week, police have additionally carried out a collection of raids to grab arms from properties across the nation. Photographs posted by the Interior Ministry confirmed a variety of firearms confiscated from residents, ages 15 to 84, who have been charged with “committing the criminal offense of illegal production, possession, carrying and trafficking of weapons and explosive substances.”

One man, 57, was arrested on May 6 after authorities found 4 firearms, together with a machine gun and a semiautomatic rifle, which he possessed illegally.

In one other search, police seized an arsenal of weapons from a number of households owned by one household. The assortment included an automated rifle, not less than 4 different weapons, two bayonets, and lots of of items of ammunition. Several members of the family, together with a 15-year-old and his two grandparents, have been dealing with prices, based on the ministry.

It was not clear why the police raided the properties.

Serbia has tried gun amnesty packages earlier than. But this current effort was unprecedented in its success, based on Mr. Vucic, who stated the full weaponry collected on this first week exceeded all 4 earlier packages within the nation mixed.

Still, the weapons turned on this week seemed to be only a fraction of the full variety of weapons within the nation, a determine that has been tough to find out. Approximately 2.7 million firearms have been held by civilians on the finish of 2017, however fewer than half have been registered with the federal government, based on The Small Arms Survey.

Gun possession is partly the legacy of the wars that adopted the breakup of Yugoslavia within the Nineties. The authorities estimates that round 400,000 individuals, about 6 p.c of the inhabitants, legally personal weapons, excluding looking weapons. Up to now, nonetheless, mass shootings had been uncommon.

Serbia now ranks third on this planet for gun possession, after the United States and Yemen (and is tied with Montenegro).

Other mass shootings internationally have prompted governments to enact stricter gun legal guidelines.

The British authorities banned semiautomatic weapons in 1987, after a gunman killed 16 individuals. Handguns have been banned in Britain almost a decade later, after a faculty taking pictures in 1996. After peaking in 2003 and 2004, the variety of firearm offenses in Britain fell by 53 p.c by 2011, the federal government reported.

A bloodbath in Australia in 1996 prompted a gun buyback program that eliminated an estimated 20 p.c of firearms from circulation. It additionally “caused reductions in firearm suicides, mass shootings and female homicide victimization,” a RAND research concluded.

The Canadian authorities imposed stricter gun measures following a mass taking pictures in 1989, as did the German authorities in 2002 and the New Zealand authorities in 2019.

A outstanding exception is the United States, the place the proper to bear arms is written into the Constitution. Despite years of lethal rampages, gun-control measures are sometimes fiercely resisted.