I'm old enough to remember when the Balkans was a pretty rough place. The fall of Yugoslavia was a nasty piece of work that created senseless war and bloodshed.

But that's now history. The region stabilized and now is pretty peaceful, all things considered. However, no place is immune to the evils that rest in the hearts of men. That's the kind of evil that leads to mass murder, such as what many like to call mass shootings.

We're told that these are uniquely American, that they don't happen in other countries. That's why we need to pass gun control, because other nations have them and don't have these mass murders.

Yeah, about that...

An armed assailant entered a care home for older people in a quiet central Croatian town Monday and opened fire, killing six people and wounding six others, police said. Croatia's prime minister said the victims were mostly in their 90s.

Croatia's police chief, Nikola Milina, said five people died immediately while one more person died in a hospital. The suspect fled the scene, but the police caught him in a cafe near the facility in the town of Daruvar, he said.

The victims were five residents of the care home and one employee, Milina said.

The suspect is "under police supervision," said a statement by the regional police office. Authorities are investigating the motive behind the attack.

N1 regional television reported that the shooter was born in 1973 and that he was a former policeman who took part in the 1991-95 war in Croatia. Officials said that one of those killed was his mother, who had lived in the care home for the past 10 years.

Daruvar resident Zlatko Sutuga told Nova TV that he knows the assailant "from the war times."

"People say that he was really aggressive, alcohol and all that," Sutuga said. "His mom was inside, he allegedly came to kill her. "

The attack has left the town stunned and grieving. Daruvar is a spa town in the municipality of Slavonia, with a population of 8,500.

Murdering one's mother is bad enough. Killing five others and injuring six more, most of them very old people who had suffered enough in their lives, is something else entirely.

Now, let's talk about this incident and how it compares to mass murders here in the United States that involve a firearm.

Croatia has some pretty extensive gun control laws. They're not banned by any stretch, but they're heavily restricted, far beyond what any American state could get away with doing. One of the requirements to get a permit involves a health evaluation that looks at both your physical and mental well-being, something many here want and swear would do some good in curbing mass murders.

And yet, it didn't.

Whether it was because the alleged killer was a cop or not isn't clear, but he was able to obtain a firearm despite reports that he was aggressive and potentially alcoholic.

So despite all the laws there, laws that would never be upheld as constitutional here, they had this horrific mass shooting--and a mass shooting by any metric, not just the Gun Violence Archive's extremely loose and biased standard. Could it be that gun control isn't the answer?

These are fairly rare in Europe, but they're not unheard of despite the extensive gun control laws on the books throughout the continent. That alone shows that this isn't a "uniquely American" problem as some have claimed.

[Edit: A previous version of this story made reference to Czechoslovakia instead of Yugoslavia. I got my slovakia's mixed up due to some reading earlier before writing this. My apologies.]