Serbian president announces gun crackdown after shootings

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Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić on Friday pledged to disarm the country, which is recovering from two mass shootings in as many days.

“We will do an almost complete disarming of Serbia,” Vučić said in a live broadcast, according to French newswire AFP.

The president announced plans to review the number of registered firearms in the country, as well as cracking down on unregistered weapons.

After a mass shooting in Port Arthur in 1996, Australia implemented a similar measure, running a major gun buyback scheme, and has largely avoided mass shootings since then.

Serbia has the third highest rate of civilian firearms in the world, tied with Montenegro, but far behind the U.S. and Yemen, with 39.1 firearms per 100 residents, according to the Small Arms Survey, published in 2018.

In spite of that, mass shootings remained relatively rare in Serbia until this week.

On Wednesday, a 13-year-old went on a shooting spree in an elementary school in a Belgrade suburb, killing nine people including eight classmates.

A day later, a gunman killed eight people and injured 14 others in a shooting near Kragujevac, a city about 140 kilometers south of Belgrade. The suspected shooter, aged 21, was later arrested, the interior ministry said in a statement.