The year started rough for the Baltic nation of Montenegro. A mass shooting claimed 22 lives and prompted officials to start talking about gun control. 

It's not particularly unusual to see, particularly in Europe where they don't seem to see the right to keep and bear arms as a basic, inalienable human right. In fact, gun ownership isn't super common throughout most of the continent, and in countries where it is, that definition of "common" is relative compared to what we think of as common here in the United States.

Now, as Montenegro looks to enact gun control, it's worth noting that it hasn't worked previously.

Vesna Pejovic vowed to reduce gun violence in Montenegro after her daughter and two grandsons were killed in a mass shooting in the town of Cetinje in 2022. Then came news on Jan. 1 that drained what optimism she had left.

A brawl in a tavern had triggered another rampage across the country's picturesque old capital in which a gunman killed 13 people with an illegal firearm then shot himself.

"We had to relive all our horrors all over again," said Pejovic, 63, who for three years has lobbied politicians to enact stricter gun controls in the small Balkan country.

"We are devastated again as we've failed to gain anything, despite striving for it with our hearts and souls."

Montenegro's Prime Minister Milojko Spajic announced stricter gun control measures following the shooting, including tougher tests to obtain licences. He also gave the owners of illegal weapons two months to freely hand them over.

But the limited impact of previous gun control measures in the Western Balkans highlights just how hard it is to eradicate violence across a region littered with millions of firearms left over from regional conflicts, and where the culture of weapon ownership runs centuries deep.

In other words, those laws haven't really done a whole heck of a lot.

Shocking, I know.

It seems that in Montenegro, folks there aren't your typical Europeans, at least when it comes to guns. This is a country that has had to repel many invaders, and at one time, every man was required to own a particular type of firearm in order to repel the many potential invaders.

Folks there are kind of like Americans in that they value their guns.

So while they've trotted out gun control before, it hasn't done a lot of good. The above-linked piece tries to make it about the country not having enough money for proper enforcement, but the truth is that it wouldn't work if they did. Just look around inner-city Chicago some time for evidence of that. 

Gun control won't work in Montenegro not because they lack sufficient enforcement but because the people who need enforcement don't think they're going to get caught in the first place. They break the law and will continue to break the law. They get caught, think they learned from the experience how to keep it from happening again, then keep it up.

You're not going to legislate people out of illegal behavior, and that includes mass murder, where the killers usually don't even care about getting out alive, much less worry about prison.

Doing so just hurts the people who did nothing wrong.