He learned how to shoot a gun from his grandfather before he started school, and he fought in three wars as a soldier in the Yugoslav and then the Serbian Army during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.
Sinisa Janicijevic became such a good shot that he regularly gets invited to weddings in villages around his hometown, Kraljevo, in central Serbia, to make sure the bride shows up — which, by tradition, involves shooting down an apple placed in a tree outside her family’s home.
The groom is supposed to perform this task but, anxious about missing, he often calls in a substitute shooter.
Serbia’s deep attachment to guns, and the plethora of them, have been widely cited as an explanation for back-to-back massacres last month — one at a school in Belgrade, the capital, and another in nearby farming villages — that stunned the nation, even if the rate of violence involving weapons is low.
Following the killings, President Aleksandar Vucic vowed to tighten gun control laws so as to enforce “almost complete disarmament.”
Persons:
Sinisa Janicijevic, Aleksandar Vucic
Organizations:
Yugoslav, Serbian Army
Locations:
Kraljevo, Serbia, Belgrade