In a landmark ruling in Belgrade, the parents of a 13-year-old who carried out Serbia’s deadliest school shooting last year have been sentenced to prison. The father received 14 years for failing to secure his legally owned weapon, while the mother was jailed for three years for child neglect. The court’s decision underscores a harsh reckoning for parental responsibility in a nation still reeling from the May 2023 massacre that left nine children and a security guard dead.
But across the Channel, the British government has seized upon this tragedy to push its own narrative on gun control. The Foreign Office issued a statement expressing ‘solidarity with the victims’ while condemning Serbia’s ‘inadequate firearm regulations’. It is a curious piece of virtue signalling given that the UK’s own gun homicide rate, while low, has ticked up in recent years. And let us not forget that the UK had its own school shooting at Dunblane in 1996, which led to a near-total ban on handguns. Yet pistols remain legal under specific licenses for target shooting, and shotguns are widely held in rural areas.
The timing is particularly convenient. With domestic crime figures rising and the government facing a backlash over its soft-on-crime policies, pointing fingers at Belgrader’s lax laws offers a welcome distraction. The Treasury, meanwhile, will be eyeing the fiscal implications. Any tightening of gun laws in Serbia could destabilise the country’s domestic arms industry, a small but politically sensitive sector. And for investors, regulatory uncertainty is never good for the bottom line.
Markets have paid little attention so far. The Belgrade Stock Exchange barely flinched, a sign that traders see this as a one-off event with limited economic fallout. But the real risk lies in the precedent it sets. If the UK continues to use foreign tragedies to pressure allies into mirroring its own restrictive legislation, we could see a ripple effect across European arms regulation. That would have consequences for manufacturers like BAE Systems, which exports to NATO allies, and for the City’s defense stocks.
Gilt yields, however, remain unmoved. The Bank of England has bigger fish to fry with sticky inflation and a sluggish economy. The shooting in Serbia is a distant event for bond markets focused on next week’s inflation data. But the broader narrative is troubling. The government’s instinct to moralise abroad while neglecting fiscal discipline at home is a dangerous game. Capital flight may not be an immediate concern, but if foreign investors perceive the UK as more interested in global grandstanding than sound economic management, the pound will pay the price.
Let us be clear: the tragedy in Serbia is a heartbreaking failure of parenting and regulation. The parents who allowed a child access to a lethal weapon deserve justice. But the UK’s sanctimonious response rings hollow when its own gun laws, while strict, still allow for the legal ownership of weapons that have been used in domestic homicides. The government should focus on its own backyard, where inflation is eroding savings and fiscal deficits are ballooning. That would be a far more productive use of Whitehall’s breath than lecturing a country that has already taken swift judicial action.
