Gun lovin' criminals

Last year I did a research on gun culture in Croatia. Its first objective was to examine history and tradition of gun ownership and use of weapons in the society. The study in addition explored the current state of affairs regarding ownership of weapons, rituals connected to the holding of the firearms, describing those occasions that are accompanied by shooting. Finally, the study emphasized divergence of public opinion on gun politics in Croatia, i.e. on different attitudes within a country as to what degree state control should be enforced upon the private ownership and usage of weapons.

My paper was prepared for a broader research project on Gun Culture in South Eastern Europe that was recently completed and that resulted in the study ‘The rifle has the devil inside’. The research project was coordinated by the Bulgarian NGO Center for the Study of Democracy and it was commissioned by the South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons.

Even though I wrote an executive summary of my country report also in Croatia, I had no idea where I saved that document. For that reason this post will be in English, even though it would be much more useful to have it in Croatian. Nevertheless, I am copying my conclusions below, as that is time consuming. Furthermore, I decided to sum up my findings here, since they were quite at odds with my basic hypothesis. Namely, prior to starting the research, I was quite determined that the gun culture in nowadays Croatia is not deeply rooted. However, the results I came across in literature and through interviews led me to different conclusions. With 375.000 legally owned and registered pieces of weapons, augmented with 700.000 illegally kept in Croatian homes, Croats do not seem as a true pacifist nation.

The tradition of celebratory shootings is inherited to certain areas of Croatia: Cetina Valley, Hrvatsko Zagorje, Dubrovnik, Rab, Korcula, Otocac, and Požega etc. It is linked to several traditional usages of guns for celebratory shooting in those events that by rule mark the victory of local population in battles with Turks. Even though those traditions are sporadical and dispersed throughout the country’s territory they implicitly underline historical grounds of the gun culture in Croatia. The hunting weapons collections as symbol of wealth of families in many of Croatian regions and the fact that gun have been traditionally passed through generations additionally qualifies Croatia as a country that (at least in certain its regions) shares values and traditions of the countries neighbouring to the East. Actually, the lowest amount of presently kept legal arms is found in the Western regions of the country, and the biggest on the eastern parts, where historically frontier with the Ottoman Empire used to be.

The 1991-1995 war directly contributed to a rise of illegal weapons in the country, particularly in war affected areas. In previous war zones the quantity of illegal weapons is disproportionaly higher than in the rest of the country. This constitutes security threats not only to the country itself, but also to a broader region. Once Croatia becomes integrated to the European Union, the issue of illegal weapons might prove problematic, since the membership implies free movement of persons within the Union, implicitly allowing smuggling of illegal weapons into the other member states. Possession of illegal weapons is additional security problem issue, since holding of the weapons contributes to the self-injuring and even injuring of the others, particularly children. Due to condemnatory picturing of criminal acts committed by the use of arms in media Croatian public considers that the weapon holding creates social problems and necessarily implies rise of crime rates. This public attitude can not be changed in spite of the official statistical data which speak in favour of the argument that legally allowed gun ownership does not influence crime rate and the balance of power between the individual and the state.