Officials say a 24-year-old student owned eight guns when he opened fire at a university building in Prague killing 14 people
Czech politicians tend to boast that their country is one of the safest in the world from gun violence. But the worst mass killing in the nation’s history this week — along with other shootings over the last decade — suggest that might not be true.
At the Faculty of Arts department at Charles University, where 14 people were killed and dozens wounded Thursday, the shooter was an excellent student, police said. But the 24-year-old also had a proclivity for firearms, with a license to own eight guns, including two long guns, police said.
Authorities said the lone assailant had no criminal record and therefore did not attract the attention of authorities.
“This kind of attack is really hard to prevent,” Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said Friday.
The shooter, who killed himself as police closed in, is believed to have been Czech. Police chief Tomas Vondrasek said officers found an arsenal of weapons with a lot of ammunition that the suspect had to carry unnoticed to the university building before opening fire.
The Czech Republic can hardly be compared to the United States but its gun legislation is considered liberal in Europe after replacing restrictions under the totalitarian communist regime that was ousted in the 1989 Velvet Revolution.
