The United States leads the world in guns per person, with Yemen in second place and Serbia in third. Serbia is trying to get off the list by asking its citizens to surrender their guns in a weapons amnesty program. This is not the first time Serbia has done this, and the most recent amnesty has been the most successful in the country’s history. To help understand if this will work, we can look to Australia, which after a mass shooting in 1996, implemented a similar program. As Australia prepared to mourn the victims of mass shootings, urgent calls for tough new gun laws were answered 12 days later with the adoption of a National Firearms Agreement. This agreement centered around 10 core measures, including registration, licensing, and safety training, but the primary focus was a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons, the most dangerous in mass shootings.
In order to retrieve these newly banned weapons already in circulation, the agreement also included a year-long gun amnesty, asking Australians to give up their weapons. It wouldn’t be easy, but the conditions were just right.
Looking at the features of Australia’s program can help us understand why it worked. Firstly, gun reform in Australia had overwhelming public support after the Port Arthur massacre, with thousands taking to the streets to demand change and polls showing 90 percent of Australians backing them up. Secondly, the weapon amnesty program was National, not just in certain parts of the country, and the government paid fair prices for every item surrendered, with businesses impacted even receiving government assistance. The amnesty was anonymous with no consequences, but it was also mandatory with serious penalties for non-compliance. To facilitate compliance, buyback centers were set up across the country for Australians to drop off their weapons, and once the weapons were collected they had to be destroyed, typically by being crushed and melted. All of this had to be implemented alongside new firearm restrictions to keep illegal weapons out of the Public’s hands.
After the amnesty was over, Australia’s 1996 buyback removed more than 640,000 guns from circulation, estimated to be about 20 percent of all weapons in Australia. Did it make a difference? Firstly, we can look at the frequency of mass shootings from 1980 to 1996, where Australia experienced 14 mass shootings, but in the 18 years since Port Arthur there have been none. This is likely also a result of Australia’s broader gun reforms. Looking specifically at the gun buybacks program, the big impact we find is on suicides, with a study finding that the states where more firearms were turned in had greater reductions in suicides since 1990.
All these countries have had weapon collection programs in which at least 10,000 firearms were destroyed, but they haven’t all been as successful as Australia’s. In the U.S, it’s estimated that since the 80s more than 500 gun buybacks have been held in 37 states, but in the U.S, buybacks are small, locally run programs and are voluntary, with no accompanying new firearm restrictions. While the majority support voluntary buybacks, they have yet to amass overwhelming public support nationally, and both mass shootings and overall gun deaths continue to rise.
Now let’s look at Serbia. Serbia’s recent weapon amnesty isn’t mandatory and doesn’t include compensation, but it does have one thing that separates it from Serbia’s earlier gun amnesties: the level of public support, as well as calls to look beyond policy and examine the culture that got them here in the first place. Most gun amnesties are temporary, and maintaining their effectiveness takes work and consistency. Even in Australia, an increasingly powerful gun lobby is chipping away at gun laws.
Still, Australia’s world-leading response to gun violence is instructive for other countries on the list. It might be impossible to replicate Australia’s exact conditions and apply every single lesson, but if Australia is any indication of what’s possible, Serbia could go from topping the list of countries with the most guns per person to one that is off the list. If Serbia can do it, maybe other countries that suffer from gun violence can do it too.