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In the wake of two shootings last year, Serbia has stepped up its gun control rhetoric in a way the Brady Campaign and others can only dream of:<\/p>\n
In response to the twin tragedies, President Aleksandar Vucic<\/a> set out on a mission to cleanse Serbia of firearms. Unlike most European countries, Serbia has many illegal guns throughout its society. Serbia has been awash in guns and the proliferation of firearms is mostly a legacy of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Serbia is tied for third with Montenegro in gun ownership in the world, behind the United States and Yemen.\u00a0 Fox Bangor<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So Vucic is telling the all 8.7 million citizen citizens to turn in all illegal guns within a 30 day grace period.\u00a0 There are an estimated legal and illegal 2.7 million firearms in civilian hands, and to date they estimate 68,000 have been turned in. Even if only 20% of those 2,700,000 are illegal – -not sure how effective that is if they have only achieved a 12.5% success rate.<\/p>\n
But Serbians are okay with the turn-ins by and large (although evidently from the stats they seem to feel “it’s great for everyone ELSE to turn their in.”) They have no equivalent to the NRA, either.<\/p>\n
Still, there are mass protests in the streets – not against guns, or particularly FOR guns – but against Vucic and his government.<\/p>\n
But Vucic\u2019s executive action to enforce existing laws did not satisfy activists in Serbia who saw the root of the horrific events not only in the presence of weapons but also in a cultural and media environment where violence is glorified, and in a political culture where the state uses awful memories of the past, and the fears that derive from them, to justify and promote violence. The Atlantic<\/a><\/p>\n
They have demanded the revocation of the broadcasting licenses of television and radio outlets that promote violence, as well as the closure of government newspapers that have urged violence against political dissidents. They have called for the resignations of all the members of the regulatory agency that oversees broadcast media.<\/p>\n
Protesters have also demanded the resignations of the interior minister, Bratislav Gasic, and the head of the national intelligence agency, Aleksandar Vulin.Radio Free Europe<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So I guess the Serbs see a government and entertainment industry which divides society and glorifies state-sponsored violence.<\/p>\n
On Beogradska street in Belgrade, scant blocks from the Vladislav Ribnikar elementary school, where nine people were murdered on May 3, you can find a plaque honoring the memory of Du\u0161an Jovanovi?<\/a>, a 13-year-old Roma boy who was beaten to death by racists in 1997. But just a short walk from there, on the corner of Aleksa Nenadovi? Street, passersby are greeted by a large mural celebrating General Ratko Mladi?, who was convicted of genocide for the murder of 8,372 civilians in Srebrenica in 1995. The mural has been there since 2021 and is assiduously protected.<\/p>\n
Countries such as Serbia, whose governments made the promise of security central to their power, have come to depend on keeping alive the very fears they pledged to defend their citizens against. The Serbian government has further shored up its authority by shutting down opposition\u2014emptying the public sphere of both genuine confrontation and the capacity to resolve disagreements. Violent ideologies easily gain traction in societies shaped by fear that also lack outlets for constructive dissension.<\/p>\n