Why demands for gun control are getting louder

“The gun that killed my daughter was bought online and paid for in nine installments,” says Nihat Palandöken.

A high school student who lived in Istanbul’s Pendik district, Nihat’s daughter Helin, was killed in October 2017 by Mustafa Yetgin, who used an unlicensed automatic air rifle. Palandöken was one of 409 women killed in femicides in Turkey in 2017. 175 women died by firearms that year.

Nihat Palandöken took it upon himself to identify how the unlicensed firearm that killed his daughter was supplied.

“I called the online firearm seller myself,” he says. Palandöken pretended that he needed a gun and asked how he could obtain one. “Give us your address and we will deliver it to your door in two days,” the sellers claimed.

“I asked if I needed to provide any documents and whether there would be any penalties if I were caught,” Palandöken continues. “They said ‘No.’ It’s similar to a food delivery system.”

He filed a criminal complaint about the seller. One of the suspects was detained months later and didn’t receive any jail time. The killer of Helin was caught on the day she was slaughtered.

“The prime minister and MPs showed up [at the family home], and we told them to at least stop online firearm sales,” Palandöken told Inside Turkey. “There are millions of firearms in households across Turkey. I said unlicensed firearms should be confiscated. Our demands made that day have not been met.”

Since then, he has campaigned for gun control.

Helin Palandöken’s story is just one example of Turkey’s widespread problem of easy access to firearms. NGO data and bills submitted to parliament show that firearms are increasingly being used in incidents of public violence as well as femicides. Experts say the problem is exacerbated by weak inspection mechanisms and the lack of publicly available sales data.

Guns on the agenda

Turkey’s We Will Stop Femicides Platform has been recording data on femicides in Turkey since 2010. The figures show that while 48% of femicides in 2021 included firearms, in 2025 the proportion rose to 58%.

Fidan Ataselim, the organisation’s general secretary, told Inside Turkey that the means of firearms acquisition vary.

“Some are family heirlooms, an old hunting rifle collecting dust in the corner, some are firearms obtained for hunting, some are assigned for the man’s job,” she says. “Most of them are guns that were acquired after seeing them in TV shows, just for show or to feel safe,” she says. “Some were acquired online or through an acquaintance as a significant piece of the plan [for the femicide].”

Turkey’s Umut (“Hope”) Foundation, which campaigns for gun control, shows in its 2025 report that 3,422 violent incidents reported in the media that year involved firearms. These incidents saw 2,225 people killed and 3,167 others wounded.

In January 2026, the conservative opposition New Road coalition demanded a parliamentary inquiry, urging an “in-depth study of the degrees reached by individual armament, its ties to violent tendencies, local security policies, legal regulations and the sufficiency of inspection mechanisms”. The coalition also called for effective policies to prevent unlicensed firearm sales. MPs from the governing coalition blocked the inquiry.

The question of who can obtain firearms and how came back onto the agenda shortly after an incident in Istanbul. Only five days after the debate in parliament, prosecutor Muhammed Çağatay Kılıçarslan shot and wounded his former spouse, Aslı Kahraman, in her office at the Istanbul courthouse where she worked as a judge.

Turkish law allows judges and prosecutors to own one domestic and one imported firearm. Unlike ordinary citizens, they are not required to present a “health report for firearm acquisition” to obtain these weapons.

Tahsin Becan, an MP for the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), requested a parliamentary investigation into individual gun ownership three days after the attack, noting that the number of unlicensed firearms in Turkey has surpassed 30 million.

“Of course, judges, prosecutors and police officers can carry licensed firearms, but the criteria need to be stricter,” says Becan, who thinks that most murder cases in the country involve unlicensed firearms. According to the opposition MP, there should be greater deterrents for those who break the law.

Better data needed

İstanbul MP Elif Esen, a signatory to New Road’s demand for a parliamentary inquiry, argues that the lack of public data is one of the biggest issues.

“The sale is unregulated, so the purchase is unregulated. But how many people bought firearms? Where are these firearms? We don’t know for sure,” she says.

Esen notes the need for a comprehensive dataset about firearm acquisition and use.

“The regulations need to be amended, because such unregulated armament brings about violent incidents,” she says.

Pınar Bodur, data coordinator for the We Will Stop Femicides Platform says that they are only able to compile femicides data through media reports and cases that are directly reported to them, as the government doesn’t share any numbers on the topic.

“The lack of official data puts information like the type of firearm used, its license status or how the perpetrator acquired it in the ‘unknown’ category,” she says.

This lack of data renders it difficult for society and policymakers to determine the real scope of the issue, she adds.

Ataselim notes that there has been an increase in both femicides and crimes involving firearms in recent years.

“Going off of this data, we could seriously reduce femicides if we can stop individual gun ownership,” she says.

Palandöken, meanwhile, continues his personal campaign for gun control, but says that he “had to slow down due to financial troubles”. He was unable to work for several years after his daughter was killed and is now supporting his younger daughter at university.

“Our home was wrecked,” he says. “We just want to prevent other homes from experiencing the same fate.”