BELGRADE, Serbia — Serbia has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world, deep political divisions and a culture of violence. This may sound familiar to many Americans, but after two mass shootings in two days rocked the country last month, Serbs did something different: they started surrendering their weapons.
Tens of thousands also took to the streets to demand action against guns in cities across the small European nation. And some believe the United States, where a series of mass shootings on Saturday night killed at least four people, could learn from the country’s response.
“I think a lot of us have just had enough,” Žarkoerko Cvejić, 42, told NBC News earlier this month outside the Vladislav Ribnikar Model Elementary School in Belgrade, where his 9-year-old daughter, Zora, was present when a seventh undergrad shot dead eight children and a security guard on May 3. Another girl died of her injuries two weeks later.
The following day, a young man with a violent background killed eight people and injured 14 in the nearby village of Dubona.
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Cvejić said Zora was “physically fine, but she is deeply emotionally disturbed”, after the mass shooting that took place shortly after he dropped her off at the school gates.
He said she had not been able to sleep alone since the incident and preferred to be accompanied at all times. “These are the kind of fears she wasn’t used to having,” he said.
“We are safe,” he said. “But now the children are dead. Something happened that should never have happened at all… something she couldn’t imagine, something none of us could imagine would happen in our town.
The 13-year-old shooter was not charged with any crime as he had not reached the age of criminal responsibility in Serbia and is instead undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. But his father was charged with a serious offense against general security. If found guilty, he faces up to 12 years in prison.
Within days, the government also launched an amnesty period, allowing citizens to give up unregistered guns by the end of June with no questions asked.
The response has been huge.
Inside a huge police warehouse on the outskirts of Belgrade, a pile of more than 70,000 revolvers and AK-47s, machine guns and pistols, some rusty, some still shiny, fill the facility, which is the size of a football field. Some date from the Second World War, others are modern.
Hundreds of thousands of weapons remain in Serbia after a decade of fighting in the 1990s following the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Željko Brkić, the deputy interior minister in charge of the firearms recall program, said that for every gun he saw a “life saved” and that he saw people “having a conscience and thinking about others “.
It was not possible for the state to protect every citizen, he said, adding that he was “shocked” by all the killings in the United States. “I can only imagine how you feel,” he said.
To those who said guns were necessary for defence, he said he would urge people to “trust the police” because it was their job to take care of the population.
Under recently introduced legislation, those who did not surrender their unregistered guns now face prison sentences of up to 15 years. Gun owners will face strict background checks, psychological evaluations and regular drug tests. Other measures were also passed, including a ban on new gun licenses, tighter controls on gun owners and shooting ranges, and tougher penalties for illegal gun possession. .
As Serbia is divided on many political issues, such as religion and gender identity, Dobrica Veselinović, an opposition MP and one of the leaders of anti-violence protests that have swept through the capital, said that the introduction of the new laws had been relatively simple.
Veselinović said the shooting “really changed public opinion” as it was the first time Serbia had witnessed mass shootings like these.
Like Australia, New Zealand and the UK, which tightened gun ownership rules after mass shootings, he said all politicians were pressured into action afterward.
After two mass shootings last year, President Joe Biden signed the law known as the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act – considered the most sweeping measure to prevent gun violence in 30 years. It came days after the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution provides for the right to carry firearms outside the home – a landmark decision that has sparked a wave of challenges to long-standing laws, both federal than state. State laws, on the other hand, remain disparate. Many have expanded gun rights and others have restricted them.
There have been more than 300 mass shootings and nearly 20,000 gun deaths in the United States this year, according to records from Gun Violence, a nonprofit that tracks the spread of so-called an American disease. Records define a mass shooting as a single incident in which at least four people – other than the shooter – are shot.
Guns, Veselinović said, were “not a vital part of our culture like there is in the United States. There is no Second Amendment.” He added that gun lobbies were also non-existent in Serbia and therefore could not pressure politicians as they could in the United States.
“I would say you don’t need more weapons. You don’t need more police, more surveillance, more cameras, more security,” he said. “You need more compassion, more listening to each other, more empathy, and more understanding of different perspectives on leaders’ lives.”
For arms dealer and arms trainer Ivan Urošević, the new laws have hit his business hard, especially the two-year moratorium on arms sales. He thinks the new regulations go too far, “It’s an emotional response to a horrific tragedy,” he said, speaking at a shooting range outside the capital. But he didn’t think the American model was the right one either.
Allowing people to sell and own guns without tracking them “is utter madness”, he said, saying there needed to be “strict or reasonable rules” in place for those trying to buy them.
While lax gun laws aren’t a path to violence per se, he added they could lead to “the normalization of the idea that violence can solve problems.”
For Cvejić, the jury was out on whether the new laws would make a difference.
“Either we profoundly change something in this society, or in a few decades we disappear,” he said.
This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com