Russia cracked down on guns with new laws after a 2016 school mass shooting. There hasn’t been a school shooting since.

May 2021

MOSCOW — Gunfire and explosions erupted at a school in central Russia on Tuesday, killing seven students and two school employees, according to witnesses and officials who blamed a teenager for the rare mass shooting in the country.

Within hours, President Vladimir V. Putin said he had ordered a tightening of Russia’s already restrictive laws on civilian gun ownership, a move that is likely to be implemented in the country’s top-down political system.

“The thing is that firearms, which are used as assault rifles and similar weapons in certain countries, are sometimes registered as hunting guns,” said the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov. “The Russian National Guard will urgently consider the issue

Russia has strict gun ownership laws. Applicants for a firearm’s license must pass psychological exams and own a smoothbore shotgun for a trial period before obtaining a rifle. Pistol ownership is more tightly controlled, largely limited to those, such as retiring military officers, who are given a pistol as an award for their service.
On Tuesday, Mr. Putin ordered the head of the agency regulating gun ownership, the Russian National Guard, to draft new rules.

The order asked for a “swift working out of new positions about the types of weapons that can be in civilian circulation, can be in the hands of the population,” Mr. Peskov said.

A member of Russia’s Parliament, Aleksandr Khinshtein, said the attacker had obtained a gun license on April 28 for a semiautomatic shotgun.

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