LYON – Montenegro and Serbia have the highest rate of small firearms owned per 100 people in Europe, show the results of the newest research by Geneva-based Small Arms Survey project, reports Euronews. For every 100 residents of these two countries there are 39.1 pieces of small firearms. The next country on the list is Cyprus, with 34 pieces.
Other countries of the Western Balkan region are also highly ranked. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the fifth country on the list, with 31.2 firearms per 100 citizens. Macedonia is seventh with 29.8 and Kosovo eleventh with 23.8.
Most gun-ownership inside the EU, apart from Cyprus, can be found in Finland and Austria, which are ranked fourth and seventh, respectively. What is more interesting is that non-EU Western European countries such as Iceland, Norway and Switzerland all cracked the top 10 on the list.
The results, however, are not very dramatic compared to the United States, where there are 120 guns per every 100 citizens. US is also the undisputed leader when it comes to overall number of small arms, which in their case is 393.3 million. The biggest European country in that regard is Russia, with merely 17.6 million, followed by the biggest EU country, Germany, with 15.8.