A fatal mass shooting in the cloistered environs of Prague might seem a bolt from the blue. In a city historically renowned for defenestrations but less for violent crime, safety and security are taken for granted much more than in most European capitals.
The reaction of Prague’s mayor, Bohuslav Svoboda, whose offices at Prague New Town Hall lie a short distance from the scene of the crime, conveyed many locals’ bewilderment as they struggled to digest the horror that had unfolded.
“We always thought that this was a thing that did not concern us,” he told Česká Televize, the national public broadcaster. “Now it turns out that unfortunately our world is also changing and the problem of the individual shooter is emerging here as well.”
Yet the incident is arguably less out of context than such remarks imply. Police said on Thursday that the gunman legally owned multiple firearms, a fact that may be explained by the fact that the Czech Republic has among the most permissive gun ownership laws in the EU.
The “right to acquire, keep and bear firearms” is recognised in Czech firearms legislation, while a constitutional amendment made to the charter of fundamental rights as recently as 2021 legally guarantees “the right to defend one’s own life or the life of another person with a weapon”.
The amendment was adopted after a petition signed by 102,000 citizens that was organised in opposition to a European Commission proposal to restrict firearm possession throughout the EU.
The opposition reflected a long history of gun ownership in the Czech lands, dating back to the Hussite rebellion against the Catholic church in 1419. Although strictly controlled during the 1939-45 Nazi occupation, and by the communist regime that ruled Czechoslovakia during the cold war, widespread gun ownership made a comeback after the 1989 Velvet Revolution that heralded the end of communism.
By 2020 there were more than 307,000 legal gun owners, in a country of about 10.6 million people, the vast majority of them citing safety and protection concerns as the reasons for ownership.
Ownership goes hand in hand with a proud tradition of Czech armament manufacture. And, perhaps not unrelatedly, mass shootings in the relatively tranquil central European country are not unknown.
In one attack, in February 2015, a 63-year-old man used two guns to shoot eight people dead in a restaurant in the eastern town of Uherský Brod before killing himself. As with the Prague shooting, the gunman legally owned both firearms.
• This article was amended on 22 December 2023. A previous version misspelled the name of the broadcaster Česká Televize as “Ceske Televize”, and the town of Uherský Brod as “Uhresky Brod”
