One night around Tetovo and Gostivar, four police reports. Three for physical assaults, one for a man who pulled out a pistol, cocked it and pointed it at another. All of it inside a window of less than sixteen hours.

It starts in Dobridol, near Gostivar, around midday - a 60-year-old reports being attacked by the man he shares a house with. It continues in the evening in Tetovo, where a 55-year-old reports that a 35-year-old assaulted his underage son. Forty minutes after midnight, the same two swap places: now the 35-year-old reports that the 55-year-old attacked him. Two men, two reports, one night.

The most serious case came around two in the morning in Zhelino. A 29-year-old reported that while he was out with four friends, a neighbour he had previous disagreements with approached them - holding a knife. He then pulled out a pistol, cocked it and aimed it at him.

From a disagreement to a cocked pistol

Nobody was hurt. Not a single shot was fired. And precisely because of that, this case will most likely end as a misdemeanour report, if it ends anywhere at all. But a man carrying a knife and a firearm in his hand over "previous disagreements" is not an incident - it is a normalised state of affairs in which every argument comes with an escalate-by-weapon option attached.

The question the Interior Ministry does not put in its daily bulletins is a simple one: where does all this weaponry in the hands of people settling private arguments on the street at two in the morning come from? Registered or not, that never makes it into the statement.

The Tetovo and Gostivar areas turn up in these overnight bulletins regularly, several cases at a time. Every time, the police announce that measures are being taken to clear things up. What is never announced is how many of these cases ended in an actual legal consequence for whoever did it - and that is the number that would tell us whether "measures" mean anything.