A restaurant in Uherský Brod, February 2015; University Hospital in Ostrava, December 2019; the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, December 2023. At intervals of four years, just as the Olympic Games or elections, mass shootings have regularly occurred in the Czech Republic over the past decade. These acts are exclusively committed by mentally disturbed individuals, and they are mostly carried out with legally owned firearms. These three cases alone have claimed nearly thirty victims in total.

Despite this, the Czech Republic is an anomaly in the global trend of tightening gun laws. As one of the “exceptions” to this trend, this country finds itself among states such as Republican-led states in the USA or Iraq—hardly a distinguished company.

The Czech Republic also represents a peculiar outlier in the “entitlement-based” legal framework for acquiring handguns (where the right to possess these weapons arises from a simple “entitlement”) in the midst of the rest of the EU, where the acquisition of firearms is subject to administrative discretion. Three out of our four neighboring countries have stricter gun legislation than the Czech Republic. Since 2021, the Czech Republic has even been one of only four countries in the world—alongside the USA, Honduras, and Yemen—to enshrine the right to bear arms in its constitution.

Meanwhile, the number of registered firearm owners in the Czech population (as of March 2024) is no more than 316,000—this anomalous legislation thus protects the interests of roughly three percent of the population while exposing the remaining ninety-seven percent of unarmed citizens to the increasingly real danger of misuse.

The tragedy of 21 December 2023 differs significantly from previous incidents, not just because it took place in the heart of the capital and its victims were not just Czech citizens. It occurred primarily due to a fatal failure of the regulatory mechanisms of the Czech Republic as a state. It was made possible by the fact that a young, recently competent, untreated psychiatric patient was allowed to legally acquire an entire arsenal of eight weapons, including semi-automatic rifles, within six months, and not a single regulatory body found this highly suspicious behaviour concerning.

In response to this tragedy—just as in 2015 after Uherský Brod and in 2019 after Ostrava—political representatives rushed to offer various assurances that this glaring failure would be rectified through legislation and that efforts would be made to prevent similar tragedies from happening in the future. And just like in both previous cases, what we are now witnessing is a rather lax approach from the ruling establishment.

The new law on weapons and ammunition, so far, only cosmetically adjusts the rules for acquiring firearms. It deals with minor matters, such as reducing the validity of health certifications for firearm ownership from 10 to 5 years, or reducing the administrative burden when issuing firearms licenses, etc. In other words, it introduces not a single measure that could effectively prevent the tragedy that led to its creation.

In light of the recent tragedy at the Faculty of Arts, we believe these measures are insufficient. We therefore appeal to our elected representatives, members of parliament, and senators, to amend the law to:

A) Limit the unusually free (and tragedy-enabling) access to semi-automatic assault rifles;

B) Similarly limit the unusually free (and tragedy-enabling) access to silencers;

C) Introduce, in addition to health certification, an assessment of the psychological fitness of each applicant for firearm ownership, for example, through mandatory psychological tests, and ensure these tests are conducted periodically.

Furthermore, we consider it desirable for the issue of access to firearms to be examined within the framework of a broader societal debate on mental health in the Czech Republic. According to available statistics, Czech society—and of course not only it—has witnessed an increase in violent and mentally unstable individuals due to social and geopolitical changes. After the mishandled coronavirus pandemic, we are facing pandemics of anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders. Instead of making access to mental health care easier in a weakened society, access to firearms is being simplified. It is as if the political representation is blind and deaf to the problems of society…

Some of us were directly present at the Faculty of Arts on 12/21/23 and became victims or witnesses of the terrible tragedy. Others of us were only absent due to fortunate circumstances. However, this tragedy personally and profoundly affected all of us. It continues to affect us, seven months later, even as the majority of society has “shaken it off,” and it will continue to affect us for a long time.

Now, it also affects us, and it is not indifferent to us, that the amendment to the weapons law is making it clear that it seems the political representation has also “shaken off” our tragedy, without drawing either personal or systemic responsibility from it.

Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them in the future. The Czech political representation is not doing enough to prevent mass shootings committed with firearms from recurring every four years. The consequences of this indifference are now borne by us. Next time, they will be borne by someone else.