Germany to curb gun rights in pointless shooting response
June 1, 2009

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

The German government has agreed to further curbs on gun rights for its residents, two months after a 17-year-old boy killed 15 people with a pistol taken from his father’s bedroom, according to various international press reports on May 7.

The left-right governing coalition has agreed to present a series of measures to the German parliament in late May further tightening arms control laws, several dailies said.

“We have agreed on reasonable changes that will mean more security without over-regulating hobby marksmen and hunters,” the deputy head of the conservative Christian Union parliamentary group, Wolfgang Bosbach, told the Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung.

It is interesting to note that in the German—or perhaps European—view of gun rights only those of “hobby marksmen and hunters” are considered worthy of concern. The whole issue of a right to arms for self-defense isn’t even part of the discussion.

The latest gun control initiative comes amid a fierce debate about guns touched off once more by the bloodbath in mid-March in which Tim Kretschmer shot nine pupils and three teachers at his old school in southwestern Germany plus three passers-by before killing himself.

The proposals on the German parliamentary table go so far as to include banning even paintball, a game in which players use airguns to shoot at opponents with ammunition filled with marker paint. Lawmakers say the sport “simulates killing” and should be outlawed.

The draft law would also bar youths under the age of 18 from shooting big bore guns at target practice and would permit police to conduct checks at the homes of licensed gunowners to ensure their firearms were stored under lock and key.

An electronic registry of firearms would also be introduced along with eventually, biometric security systems, to help insure guns are only used by their rightful owners.

Finally, lawmakers would introduce an amnesty for owners of illegal firearms if they turn them in to authorities.

None of the proposals before the German parliament is likely to do any more to prevent a future mass murder spree like the March shooting than the many existing gun laws. They only provide helpless and clueless politicians with the sheep’s clothing of “action” while further gnawing away at what little firearms rights remain in a country with some of the strictest gun control in the world.

Germany has a long history of gun control dating back to the 1930s, and some of their laws have been copied with an equal lack of success in other countries, including the US.

All around the world, laws that focus on the law-abiding have proven useless when it comes to crime prevention. Here’s another example:

An Associated Press report from Azerbaijan, a former Soviet Republic on the Caspian Sea, which ran as four paragraphs in the May 1 issue The Buffalo News, shows how copycats of mass murder and suicide can strike anywhere in the world, no matter how strict the gun laws.

That report said a young man armed with an automatic pistol and several magazines of ammunition rampaged through a prestigious institute in the capital city of Baku on Apr. 30, killing 12 people and wounding at least 10 others before killing himself as police closed in, the government said.

Little is known about the gunman and even less about his motive for the bloodshed that shook the faculty and students at the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy (ASOA), a noted college which attracts students from all over the world, and whose graduates have included future presidents and business magnates.

The suspect, identified as Farda Gadyrov, a native of Georgia according to papers found on his body, entered the academy and climbed five floors of the building, shooting everyone he met along the way, according to a joint statement from the Interior Ministry and state prosecutors. “The statement did not give a motive for the attack,” the first report concluded.

The next day, however, police detained Nadir Aliyev, believed to be from the same village as the suspected shooter, and later charged him with complicity in the crime at the ASOA, according to Interfax-Azerbaijan, which cited sources at the Baku Prosecutor’s Office.

Latest reports unearthed by Gun Week, found that most of the wounded were still in hospital as this column is written, with at least one suspect, a Sudanese student, having been discharged from medical care.

Meanwhile, back on Capitol Hill, the anti-gunners are pushing a seemingly innocuous bill, HR-2159, labeled the “Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2009.” There is also a Senate version of this bill, sponsored by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), which would add the Homeland Security Department’s “watch list” of suspected terrorists to the National Instant Check System (NICS), to the “do-not-sell” or proscribed list.

The measures allow the Attorney General to deny firearms or explosives to those he believes are or may be terrorists, or supporting terrorists. Maybe that might be acceptable to some, but not when considered in relation to some other facts.

First, the terrorist watch list is classified. No one knows who is on the list, or how they got on the list, or—more importantly—how you get off the list.

Second, there are people at Homeland Security who have recently been revealed as warning of the potential for “right wing terrorism” among gunowners, military veterans, Republicans, and tax protestors.

But it is important to note, that “conservatives” and “libertarians” are not the only ones who are concerned with the secret “terrorist watch list.”

In early May, the liberal, anti-gun New York Times reported that the FBI has incorrectly kept nearly 24,000 people on a terrorist watch list on the basis of outdated or sometimes irrelevant information, while missing people with genuine ties to terrorism.

The Times cited a recently released Justice Department report in its story.

The report said the mistakes posed a risk to national security, because of the failure to flag actual terrorism suspects, and an unnecessary nuisance for non-suspects who may be questioned at traffic stops or kept from boarding airplanes.

By the beginning of 2009, the report said, this consolidated government watch list comprised about 400,000 people, recorded as 1.1 million names and aliases, an exponential growth from the days before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Times claimed the new report, by the office of the Justice Department’s inspector general, provides the most authoritative statistical account to date of the problems connected with the list. An earlier report by the inspector general, released in March 2008, looked mainly at flaws in the system, without an emphasis on the number of people caught up in it.

The list has long been a target of public criticism, particularly after well-publicized errors in which politicians including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) showed up on it. People with names similar to actual terrorists have complained that it can take months to be removed from the list, and civil liberties advocates charge that antiwar protesters, Muslim activists and others have been listed for political reasons.

The report, examining nearly 69,000 referrals to the FBI list that were either brought or processed by the bureau, found that 35% of those people, both Americans and foreigners, remained on the list despite inadequate justification.

However flawed the list, it’s the one that Lautenberg and his allies would use as a way to keep more people from owning guns. Compared to the German politicians, Lautenberg may look like a piker, but his bill is no more practical that the banning of paintball.
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