“Shock & Surprise”: Serbia Reels from Two Mass Shootings, Demands Stronger Gun Control

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We end today's show in Serbia, which is reeling from a pair of mass shootings that left 17 people dead. On May 3, a 13-year-old boy, a student, went on a rampage at a school in the capital, Belgrade, killing eight students in a school guard. It was Serbia's first mass school shooting. The following day, a 21-year-old Serbian man shot dead eight people nearby. The shooting shocked the country and led to quick calls for sweeping gun control measures.

And Serbia's President Aleksandar Vucic vowed to completely disarm the country. More than 6,000 unregistered guns and weapons have already been turned in, after the government announced a month-long amnesty on illegal weapons. Nearly 300,000 rounds of ammunition have also been surrendered. We go now to the Serbian journalist Liliana Smolovic. She is a former editor of Politica, the oldest daily newspaper in the Balkans, also is a columnist for Belgrade Political Weekly magazine. We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Liliana. Thank you so much for being with us.

Can you first lay out what happened and then the country's response, the population? In fact, there's about to be yet another anti-gun mass mobilization in Belgrade today. First time, you know, their sense of security has been taken away completely. So what they're thinking now is, is my child safe at school? This other mass murder happened in a sleepy little suburb of Belgrade. They're wondering, can we still meet up late with neighbors and walk home afterwards? So there's this shock and surprise and something that's never happened before. Last week, after 17 people were killed in the two mass shootings, including eight children, tens of thousands of people joined protests against gun violence in Belgrade, demanding top government officials resign. This is a protester. It is tragic that so many kids killed by their peers were buried in a short period of time.

This is a low point. We are already used to what happens in Texas, but their weapons are openly purchased. And here, where do they get the firearms? It is a disaster. This is the Serbian president, Aleksandar Vucic, speaking last week at a news conference in Belgrade after both mass shootings. Everyone who has a weapon, and that's around 400,000 individuals, and I'm not talking about hunting weapons, will have to go through revision. And after that, there won't be more than 30,000 to 40,000 of them. We'll practically conduct a complete disarmament of Serbia.

For owning an illegal weapon, penalties will be much more severe, almost double. Of course, even that will not be enough for the small number of weapons that will remain. For hunters, we're usually more disciplined, and for everyone else, we will conduct biannual and annual exams of gun owners, including medical, psychiatric and psychological evaluations. If deemed necessary by the authorities, a substance use test will be conducted within 48 hours. Let's see if we have Liliana Smilovic back. And if we do, it seems like Serbia is mobilizing against gun violence much faster than the United States. You've had two mass shootings.

We have, on average, at least one a day in the United States. Explain what's happening. What's happening is that we have a political hegemon in power. He has been in power for over 10 years. He has a majority in parliament. He's a hands-on president. He's also the president of the ruling party.

So when he promises something, when he says he's going to move on something, he moves on it, and people know that he can deliver. So the protests, the mass opposition protests that we've had a couple of days ago, and we're expecting another major protest tonight, these protests are not so much against his measures. People, by and large, approve the measures that the president has announced. People are surrendering their weapons en masse. He just announced today that 9,000 weapons were surrendered, which has more than had happened in four previous campaigns of the sword, where people were asked to turn in their unregistered weapons, and there would be no consequences that they do. But the protests are really the protests against this long-serving president who is being accused of being a dictator. Only he truly politically is omnipotent.

So the opposition sees this crisis of people's sense of security as a good opportunity to try to dislodge or destabilize the government and extort some important political concessions. They want several key people in the government that are known as personal choices of the president to be fired. They want two of the most popular political stations to lose their broadcasting licenses, at least for national frequencies and only to remain cable companies. So they have huge demands, and they figured that this is a good moment to try to win some concessions from a very strong and stable, otherwise stable government. You are, to say the least, a global observer. You've seen what's happened in the United States, and then you see what's happening in Serbia. How are the mass shootings in the United States perceived from there? And this immediate crackdown on guns, especially illegal guns on the streets of Serbia, like we haven't seen in the United States ever? We are a society that's just as deeply polarized politically as the United States.

So we used to look at the United States and say, oh, that happens there, because they have all those weapons, and they have these open carry and all this. But we also felt that we were better, and that this kind of thing could not happen here. And immediately there were political accusations. The government minister, who was forced to resign, said, this is what comes from your so-called Western values. Well, the opposition responded, no, this is what comes from Putinism, from being pro-Russian. So that was the debate. But by and large, people approve of restrictive measures, and they cannot understand that the United States is unable to do anything about their problem.

So people are saying, OK, this has not been imported from the United States. We are simply part of the big world. And these are things that happen in that outer world. And some things that are happening in this society have a lot to do with what's happening in other more developed societies.

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