Jakob Weizman, a Danish student at the Charles University in Prague, was taking an exam on Thursday when he started hearing gunshots and screams. <\/p>\n
His first instinct was shock, he said \u2013 he never thought a school shooting would happen near him, in Europe. <\/p>\n
He pointed to a recent spate of shootings elsewhere in the continent, saying: \u201cYou see this happen in Denmark,\u00a0Serbia, and now here. This is\u00a0incredibly frightening, you\u00a0know?\u201d <\/p>\n
Weizman and his professor locked the door of their exam room and barricaded it with chairs and tables, staying inside for an hour until the police arrived and escorted them out of the building. <\/p>\n
The gunman killed at least 14 people and wounded 25, in the Czech Republic\u2019s deadliest mass shooting in decades. Police said the gunman, a 24-year-old man, was a student of the Faculty of Arts at the university, but has not been formally identified because of the severity of his injuries. He has not been named. <\/p>\n
Authorities are still investigating a motive. <\/p>\n
Weizman said as an international student, he had different study circles than local Czech students and therefore did not know the shooter. <\/p>\n
The Czech Republic is just the latest in a string of European countries to suffer a mass shooting of the kind that has become ubiquitous in the United States. <\/p>\n
In June 2022, a gunman killed three people and wounded several others at a shopping mall in the Danish capital Copenhagen. Gun violence is relatively rare in Denmark, which is considered to have some of the most restrictive gun laws in Europe. <\/p>\n
And in May this year, Serbia was left reeling after\u00a0two mass shootings\u00a0in less than 48 hours. A 13-year-old boy\u00a0killed at least eight children and a security guard at his school in the capital Belgrade; just a day later, a\u00a021-year old gunman wielding an automatic weapon killed eight people in the village of Dubona. <\/p>\n
Gun ownership is high in Serbia, but the sort of mass shootings seen on a\u00a0daily basis in the US\u00a0are extremely rare in the Balkan country. Until May, school shootings\u00a0in Serbia were virtually unheard of. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the sort of\u00a0culture of social media, that\u00a0these people get glorified,\u201d she said. \u201cSocial media has no\u00a0borders, so people in other\u00a0countries will begin to follow\u00a0them or copycat them, or see\u00a0the kind of notoriety that\u00a0is raised.\u201d <\/p>\n
She cautioned that with the Prague shooting, the gunman\u2019s motive is still under investigation \u2013 but that his social media networks would undoubtedly be part of that probe. <\/p>\n
The Prague gunman had a gun permit and owned several weapons, according to Czech Police President Martin Vondr\u00e1\u0161ek. <\/p>\n
The Czech Republic has relatively liberal gun laws compared to the rest of the European Union. To obtain a gun legally, a person needs an official firearm license, which requires a medical examination, a weapon proficiency exam and no previous criminal record. <\/p>\n
According to official police statistics, more than 300,000 people have legal permits to own a gun. As of 2022, almost 1 million legally owned weapons were officially registered in the Czech Republic. <\/p>\n
But this shooting might evoke greater national debate about gun ownership and restrictions. Although the country has more liberal gun ownership rules than many of its neigbors, questions will be asked whether the Czech Republic should adopt \u201csome of the more stringent laws\u00a0throughout the European Union,\u201d Kayyem said. <\/p>\n
In the US, gun ownership is a constitutional right and far more ubiquitous than Europe. There are 120 guns for every 100 Americans, according to the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey (SAS). No other nation has more civilian guns than people. <\/p>\n\n
Jakob Weizman, a Danish student at the Charles University in Prague, was taking an exam on Thursday when he started hearing gunshots and screams. His first instinct was shock, he said \u2013 he never thought a school shooting would happen near him, in Europe. He pointed to a recent spate of shootings elsewhere in the <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":13231,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13230","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}