Kazan shooting.

What's happened and how does the Russian community reacts to this?

Photo by Egor Aleev/TASS

One sick bastard shot children today in Kazan.

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A 19-year old guy entered a school from where he graduated 4 years ago in Kazan (the capital of Tatarstan) and murdered a teacher, a woman, and 7 children. 18 children with 3 adults are in hospital now with different kinds of injuries.

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It's an awful tragic event and the Russian community is in grief and shock now. Some people blame local authorities who issued a gun to a mentally sick person. Others question the security: how a person could enter a school with a gun? And the thirds blame the whole schooling system that doesn't monitor children's mental health.

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Despite the very complicated procedure of getting and keeping a gun in Russia, we still get these cases. During the last 5 years, we knew about not less than 14 cases of a school shooting. The most horrific one has happened in 2018 in Kerch (Crimea) when an 18-year old killed 20 people and wounded 70 others before committing suicide.

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At that time Putin started to talk about total control over weapons. But as we see 3 years have passed and today another sick child murdered children with the same Hatsan escort gun that was used in Crimea.

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Personally, I think shooting is a world's problem nowadays. I don't believe that just restricting gun usage is gonna solve the issue (as we can see it doesn't work). We need to stop popularizing war, and instead of spending billions on wars, weapons, and military parades, spend this money on improving the whole schooling system. Invest in specialists who work with children and with parents, improve and reform the mental health system in Russia.

But our government obviously doesn't think the same way. They believe that the problem is in guns and social media, that's why Putin planning to review gun control laws in the country and take social media under control (the keyword here is "planning").

As Alyona Popova - Russian social activist, women's rights advocate, wrote in her Instagram:

"Such tragedies happen in different countries. But the cult of violence, tolerance to violence, which is the backbone of the current system directly affect the growth of aggression and the desire to demonstrate violence <...>As long as there is no normal system of violence prevention in Russia, while there is cult of violence, officials must be responsible for these tragedies."

I absolutely share her sentiment, considering the history of violence in our country and the justification of it nowadays (just look at our police brutality during peaceful protests or the absence of the law against domestic violence). But it doesn't answer the question of why these terroristic attacks happen all over the world.

Why do you think it happens? What solutions do you see?

*write down in comments

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Мои глубокие соболезнования тем, кто понес невосполнимую утрату сегодня.

P.S. I originally made this post on Instagram and got a lot of answers and solutions from people. But Instagram decided to remove my post.