Mass shooting in Prague leads to new calls for gun control
A mass shooting at Charles University in Prague, capital city of the Czech Republic, that resulted in fourteen killed, along with the murderer, and twenty-five injured, an incident that came after three other shooting deaths that have been attributed to the same shooter, has led to calls for much stricter gun control in that country and to sneering in the international press about the supposedly permissive nature of Czech gun laws. The killer was a licensed owner with a total of eight legally possessed firearms, which the Associated Press referred to as a “proclivity for firearms,” his collection being called an “arsenal” by the BBC. The New York Times wondered how he was able to “amass an armory without arousing suspicion.”
The answer is that the killer met the requirements for legal gun ownership in the Czech Republic. Which is to say, he was twenty-four years old and therefore was old enough for any of the five categories of ownership—collecting, hunting, sport shooting, security work, and personal protection—for which licenses are issued. (What specific licenses he may have had has not appeared in current news reports.) He presumably would have passed a written test to show his knowledge of relevant laws, of firearms, and of first aid and would have demonstrated his ability to handle firearms safely and passed various checks into his health and criminal record. Such guns as he legally possessed would have been registered to him.
What specific guns the killer used in the multiple murders that he committed has not been released, though of his eight guns, two were long guns. Nor is there currently any information available on the magazine capacities of the weapons he employed. But with those exceptions, it is worth noting that he fulfilled the usual list of demands made by American gun control groups and carried out in the laws of states such as California and New York. A petition, created by Daniel Dvoriak, a student at Charles University, would like to see a lot more restrictions, namely a ban on the possession of weapons by anyone who is not a member of the armed security forces, with exceptions only for unspecified “justified cases.”
How likely any such change in Czech law is to pass is for experts on their domestic politics to judge, but the nation’s history makes me think that it has little chance of gaining broad support. The Czechs have a long history with personal weapons, going back to the battles of the Reformation, and their recent experience with German occupation during the Second World War, the period of communist rule, and current conflicts in Europe have led them to adopt legal protections for gun rights that extend even to the nation’s constitution, which guarantees the right of self-defense with arms, laws that were enacted in part as a response to European Union efforts at curtailing private ownership. And given the possibility that the word, pistol, derives from a Czech term for a pipe and the fact that the Czechs have been making guns for about half a millennium—I promise that I am not sponsored by Česká zbrojovka Uherský Brod, though I should be—my own sense is that the Czechs will continue to protect the right of their people to be armed.
And no, that is not an anticipation that the Czechs will be blasé about a mass shooting. It is instead a recognition that if someone has determined to murder a lot of people at once, he will find a way. The United States and Czech Republic are not alone, even if we restrict killings to those committed with firearms. If we broaden our consideration to incidents of terrorism, that is even more clear, and if we look at overall homicide rates, Americans and Czechs are far below the most violent nations.
I have written before about ways to address the specific problem of mass killings—of persons who seek to murder a lot of their fellow human beings at once with the goal of gaining validation and notoriety or whatever other in fact in applicable purpose. How that may apply here is anyone’s guess at the moment. The Czech healthcare system follows the Swiss model—i.e., Obamacare that works—and this includes at least some measure of mental health services, and the police have some ability to remove weapons from anyone who has shown signs of being a threat, something that perhaps could be developed in more detail. But the reality is that as long as some human beings have the desire to kill others and as long as we live in a world of physical forces, there will always be a risk that incidents such as the one in Prague will occur, even if would-be killers have to resort to box cutters and trucks as their weapons.
We can reduce their likelihood by taking care of each other and by watching out for persons who seek to do harm—watching for signs of a killing to come and watching what is going on from moment to moment around us. But disarming those who have no wish to initiate violence against others is not an answer.