The European perspective

There’s some serious talk going on about increasing the oppression of gun owners in Europe:

Against the backdrop of deadly school shootings in Finland and Germany, European Union legislators Thursday overwhelmingly backed tough new gun control rules they said they hoped would prevent Europe from becoming a gun-friendly culture like the United States.

Under the new rules, hammered out in 18 months of negotiations between the European Parliament, national governments and gun advocates, individuals age 18 and over will be able to buy and own a firearm, provided they are not deemed a threat to public safety. Individuals under 18 will only be able to obtain a gun for hunting or target shooting under the supervision of a licensed adult.

To plug holes in the current system, in which the registration of guns is not consistent across the 27-member bloc, each member state will be obliged to set up a computerized database of firearms, including details about their model, caliber, serial number and the names and addresses of both the seller and the buyer. The data must be kept by authorities for at least 20 years.

European legislators of all political stripes said the new rules were essential to prevent Europe from embracing the gun culture of the United States, where the right to bear arms is written in the constitution.

“We in Europe have a different culture than in the United States and we do not consider the freedom to buys weapons a human right,” said Gisela Kallenbach, a German member of the European Parliament from the Green group, who helped draft the proposed law. “All European cows are registered Europe-wide, so why not guns, if it can save lives? Civil liberties can be sacrificed if we can prevent people from being killed.”

How appropriate. A German who wants to sacrifice civil liberties to prevent people from being killed. That was done once before by the Germans in 1938:

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Jews (§5 of the First Regulations of the German Citizenship Law of 14 November 1935, Reichsgesetzblatt I, p. 1333) are prohibited from acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as truncheons or stabbing weapons.  Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority.

The only question is, which lives will they be saving? In 1938 it was the Nazi lives that would be saved by sacrificing the civil liberties of the Jews.

When someone takes a weapon from you it’s an exceedingly rare circumstance that your safety will be increased. It’s someone else’s safety that might be increased.

What’s the problem with registration? Registration is a problem because those records were used by the Nazis to find all the Jews with firearms and experience with firearms. Firearms registration fails my Jews in the Attic Test. Firearms registration enables scenes like this:

The European Union doesn’t want to be a “gun-friendly culture”, instead they want to be tyrant-friendly culture. How many tens of millions of people must be murdered before they learn their lesson?

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