The drive-by shooting happened just as the Serbian government moved to tighten gun laws after a school shooting shook Belgrade. Eight children and a security guard were killed when a seventh-grader opened fire Wednesday at his school.
The government’s move to change gun laws included instituting a two-year moratorium on the issuance of permits to keep and carry small firearms, and a commitment to review all existing weapons permits within three months.
It will also begin drafting regulations to allow mandatory drug tests in secondary and primary schools for students in the seventh and eighth grades, among other measures.
Serbian officials said the student was arrested after Wednesday’s attack at the Vladislav Ribnikar elementary School and was thought to have used his father’s gun. Six children and a schoolteacher were also wounded in the rampage, they said.
The government declared three days of mourning after the school shooting, which Belgrade’s mayor described as “unprecedented in the history of our city.”
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić was expected to address the nation on Friday after the village shooting.
Serbia has the world’s fifth-highest rate of civilian gun ownership per capita, tied with Montenegro, with 39.1 firearms per 100 people, according to 2017 data collated by the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Small Arms Survey. The United States has the highest, with 120.5 guns per 100 people.
Yet Serbia had comparatively low rates of gun deaths, according to 2016 Global Burden of Disease data, putting it outside the top 50.
Mass killings have been relatively rare in Serbia, even though illegal guns are widespread in the Balkans — a remnant of the wars of the 1990s.
Frances Vinall
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