An amateur's view: why Ukrainians are defenseless against terrorists

On April 18, a terrorist attack took place in Kyiv: a man with a legally registered weapon went out in the middle of the day and started shooting at passersby. Then he broke into a store and took hostages.

Eventually, he was killed by special forces during an assault. However, before that, he managed to shoot six people and wound 14 others. The man was just walking down the street and straying, and no one could stop him.

Because other passersby were law-abiding, unarmed, and therefore defenseless.

In all the debates about granting Ukrainians the right to own, carry, and use short-barreled weapons in the event of an attack, one of the main arguments is that "neutralizing criminals is the job of the police." On the morning of April 19, a video was posted on social media showing police officers standing next to a person who was either frightened or injured, hearing approaching shots and starting to run away. Leaving people to their fate. Behind them, a civilian falls down, probably one of the shooter's victims. The armed police officers who were supposed to stop the shooter fled. An internal investigation has now been launched, and they have been suspended from duty, but this will not bring back human lives.

The reaction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was not delayed either: Minister Ihor Klymenko said that the police would tighten control over the storage of weapons. In practice, this will mean visits to hunters and other gun owners to check storage rules.

The terrorist attack in Kyiv has sparked a new wave of discussions on the need to give civilians the right to purchase short-barreled weapons and defend themselves. For example, the head of the Center for Countering Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council, Andriy Kovalenko, called for such a right, and I agree with him.

After all, the restrictions imposed by the police, ostensibly for the safety of citizens and gun control, have not worked in Kyiv. The shooter had a registered weapon, which means that the police restrictions on the regulation of circulation did not work. Now they are still checking the medical institution where the shooter underwent a psychological examination, which is required to obtain a gun permit, meaning that the medical examination could very well have been of poor quality or even a fiction.

However, unfortunately, today allowing citizens to freely buy and carry short-barreled weapons will not help. Why? Because every time a citizen is faced with the choice of protecting himself or herself and others from a psycho, he or she will choose to do nothing. Ukrainian legislation provides a phantom right to self-defense, but it does not actually give it. A person has to analyze the level of threat and, God forbid, not to cause unnecessary harm to the attacker. An attacker, like the Kyiv shooter, does not face such a dilemma. This applies even to the military, who move around the city with weapons, meaning that even if they had a machine gun, they would think twice about whether or not to shoot a terrorist. Because then you can end up behind bars for a long time. And the lucky ones like Sternenko are rare. Usually, self-defense in Ukraine is punished almost more severely than the attack itself.

Due to excessive control over weapons, the country lacks an adequate culture of handling them, and the abundance of surrogates like traumatic pistols harms this even more. The culture is so weak that even police officers handle weapons at the level of amateurs. Recently, the founder of the Ukrainian Association of Gun Owners, Heorhiy Uchaykin, released a collection of videos of accidental shootings that occurred because police officers were not able to handle their service weapons. In all of the videos, the police officers first pulled the slide of the weapon to make sure that there was no cartridge in the barrel, then disconnected or removed the magazines, made a test trigger, and were very surprised by the shot.

Of course, along with the opportunity to have a weapon and adequately defend oneself, a culture of handling weapons will emerge quite quickly - there are many examples of this, but again, Ukraine needs to urgently and qualitatively change its weapons legislation.

Without this, the terrorist attack in Kyiv, in addition to the existing consequences - the dead and wounded - will harm law-abiding Ukrainians with unnecessary checks and even greater restrictions on the right to self-defense.

Кирило Бойко