Wait. So they care about life?

[mahnmut]

An unprecedented campaign of disarmament has taken place across Serbia, following last week's double shooting spree that sparked protests and calls for tighter controls on violent content in media outlets:

https://www.euronews.com/2023/05/11/serbs-surrender-8500-weapons-in-disarmament-campaign-after-double-shooting-spree

Woah.

Imagine this in the US after mass shootings.

To put this into perspective, Serbia has 6.5 million people, the US 340 million. The Serbs returned 8,500 illegal or legal weapons in just 1 week. That would be about 500,000 illegal or legal weapons returned US-wide in the week after a mass killing.

I'd completely understand you if you now told me this would never happen in the US, ever. That would be too extreme even if a mass shooting took place in the halls of Congress which at this point I do see coming some day.

One'd hope the US at least comes to its senses and comes with with some kind of gun control that makes sense but you'll forgive me if I won't hold my breath.

Comments

[dewline]

Given Serbian history, it does come as something of a shock. I might not have expected it. But the precedent is now in place...

[garote]

Sounds like Serbia's problems are worse than the US. If you scale the mass shooting deaths by population, the equivalent for the US would be a pair of mass-shooting incidents killing about 1100 people. That's about 1/3 as many people as died in the September 11 attacks in New York. That would cause quite a reckoning, I think.

It's also interesting to consider this in the context of other deaths. Gun violence is preventable. Mass shootings are preventable. In 2021, about 25,000 people were murdered via gun (and a further 25,000 more committed suicide via gun). Death by poisoning is preventable too. In 2022, 87,000 people died in the US from a preventable poisoning incident, almost all of those drug overdoses. I can't find credible statistics for how many gun homicides were related to the criminal drug trade, including armed robberies to feed a habit, but I get the feeling that if we paid attention to the systemic causes of drug addiction, we'd see an attendant reduction in gun violence.

But, here in the states, opinions are polarized. There are large numbers of people who go through their lives never touching a firearm, and only see them in the ridiculously violent gun-happy films coming out of Hollywood, or attached to the hip of a police officer. And then there's an entirely separate group of people who have handled and shot a non-hunting firearm, most of whom own one as well. Usually these groups loathe each other and call each other things like "coward" and "gun nut". So reconciliation is not happening any time soon. Maybe three or more generations from now...

[mahnmut]

Wouldn't you need to scale all victims of mass shootings for the last year in Serbia to those in the US?

[airiefairie]

I do not see reconciliation happening even in 5 generations, unless these two groups start teaching their kids towards reconciliation, which I do not see happening at present.