Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic pledged to disarm the country, proposing gun-control measures on Friday after two shootings, one of them at a school, killed at least 16 people.
The rampages this week shook the Balkan nation where such shootings were relatively rare.
The Serbian president addressed the country Friday after police said they arrested a person suspected of firing from a car and killing eight people in a village in Mladenovac, south of the capital, Belgrade.
The drive-by shooting happened Thursday just as the Serbian government was moving to tighten gun laws, prompted by a school shooting in Belgrade, where police said eight children and a security guard were killed when a seventh-grader opened fire Wednesday.
The proposed gun-control measures include instituting a two-year moratorium on the issuance of gun permits and tougher penalties for the possession of illegal weapons.
“We will carry out an almost total disarmament of Serbia,” Vucic said. “We must make a decision to confront this evil.”
He called the mass killing in Mladenovac a terrorist incident and an attack on the whole country. The shooter had wounded 14 people before fleeing the scene Thursday, according to Serbia’s public broadcaster, RTS.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs said police arrested him Friday after a manhunt and were investigating his motive.
Vucic also announced that 1,200 police officers would be hired to boost security in schools around Serbia, after Wednesday’s attack at the Vladislav Ribnikar Elementary School.
Serbian officials said the student, who was arrested, was thought to have used his father’s gun in the rampage, which also injured six children and a teacher.
The government has declared three days of mourning after the school shooting, which Belgrade’s mayor described as “unprecedented in the history of our city.”
Mass killings have been rare in Serbia, even though illegal guns are widespread in the Balkans — a remnant of the wars of the 1990s.
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.
