By Noah
Rothman
Monday,
June 19, 2023
As
admissions against personal interest go, it’s hard to beat the thrall in which
gun-control advocates find themselves amid their newfound respect for the model
to which all civilized nations should aspire: Serbia.
“Rocked
by 2 mass shootings in 2 days,” the NBC
News headline read,
“this small country chose a different path.” The report extolls the virtues of
the Serbian civic compact, which witnessed a dramatic public response to a
government-sponsored “amnesty period” in which residents could turn in
unregistered weapons without risking penalties. As “amnesty” suggests, many of
the tens of thousands of weapons the government reclaimed were already
outlawed, and Belgrade’s haul captured only a fraction of the weapons
circulating in a nation that experienced a civil war in living memory. But the
country’s effort to strengthen its firearms laws extends beyond confiscation:
Under recently introduced legislation, those who have not given up their
unregistered weapons now face prison sentences of up to 15 years. Gun owners
will face strict background checks, psychological evaluations and regular drug
tests. Other measures have also been enacted, including a ban on new gun
licenses, stricter controls on gun owners and shooting ranges, and tougher
punishment for the illegal possession of weapons.
This NBC
News report and a companion segment broadcast on NBC’s Today via
reporter Richard Engle don’t dwell on new Serbian legal mechanisms designed to
reduce the number of firearms in circulation. Rather, what has animated this
country’s new champions in the West is its emotional response to two recent
acts of mass gun violence and the lack of legal or constitutional impediments
to implementing radical alterations to the social compact. As Engle
beamed, the Serbian
public committed themselves to “more than thoughts and prayers” when “outrage
became action.”
“Tens of
thousands demanded not just tighter gun controls but a reorientation of society
away from violence,” Engle continued, “a reaction against armed rage.” In an
interview with one Serbian, the NBC News reporter solicited advice for
Americans who are distraught over their own country’s stubbornly inflexible
constitutional rights. “I would say, safeguard your democracy if you still have
it,” he replied.
This is
a revealing exercise. The source of NBC News’s frustration is exposed in these
reports as an American political culture that is resistant (by the Founders’
design) to fashion. If Serbia is anyone’s model, it’s not because it has a
robust “democracy” to “safeguard.” It is because its democratic institutions
are fledgling, and its dominant political culture is tribal and reactionary.
Few with
a comprehensive understanding of Serbia’s social covenant would promote it as a
model mature liberal democracies should emulate. Sure, Belgrade has recently
adopted a less tolerant view toward firearms ownership, but that’s possible
because Belgrade already has a less tolerant view toward many other essential
liberties.
A European
Parliament report
published in 2022 found that journalists operating in Serbia are exposed to
intimidation campaigns, harassment, and even physical attacks. With its
historic ethnic ties to Russia, the country has also become a haven for the
production and dissemination of disinformation — a condition facilitated by the
“long-standing anti-EU/pro-Russian political rhetoric widely spread via
government-controlled media as well as by government officials.”
Last
year, the CIVICUS Monitor’s International Human Rights Watch List added Serbia
to its ignominious register of states that are hostile to free association
following the Serbian government’s unofficial but enforced restrictions on
EuroPride celebrations. “This ban is a continuation of the practice of banning
peaceful assemblies because of violent counter-assemblies,” said one civil
liberties activist.
The activist’s organization details a number of recent attacks on Serbia’s LGBT
community to which the police have been conspicuously unresponsive.
The
nonprofit global watchdog Freedom House has found Serbia’s commitment
to political liberalism wanting, but its illiberalism is cleverly cloaked in
fads that make it hard for Western progressives to recognize. In 2020, its
parliament reduced the vote threshold a party must secure to win seats and
imposed a “gender quota” on party lists. This superficially pluralist reform
was, however, designed to weaken an opposition party boycott of mid-pandemic
elections, which the government’s
critics argued
was illegitimate. Its campaign-finance laws are used to lock opposition forces
out of government. The country’s legal restrictions on money laundering and its
anti-terror statutes have been exploited to target nongovernmental
organizations that promote human rights. As the NBC News report itself
confessed, the private institutions that compose American civil society, such
as private lobbying groups, are “nonexistent in Serbia and so cannot pressure
politicians the way they can in the U.S.” If these reporters find that
condition at all objectionable, it is not apparent from this dispatch.
It is
not despite these arbitrary vestiges of Serbia’s Yugoslav past but because of
them that NBC News has found something to celebrate in Belgrade’s recent
reforms. It is because Serbia is less beholden to the inviolability of individual
rights that it can impose and enforce legal restrictions on its citizens in
response to trends that bubble up from the streets. That fact gets short shrift
in NBC’s reporting because Serbia is a mere talisman. This selective overview
of the Serbian legal landscape serves only to provide NBC News reporters with a
platform from which they can rain moral opprobrium down upon their fellow
Americans.
This
report is valuable, though, as a window into a particular psychological
predisposition. Americans who are beholden to the cult of action see the
challenges associated with an abundance of liberty as a problem to be solved.
But if the alternative to liberty is caprice, it’s a good problem to have.
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