What do you guys think of this?

European Parliament backs tighter gun controls

The Associated Press
Thursday, November 29, 2007

BRUSSELS, Belgium: Responding to a school massacre in Finland and other deadly shootings, European Union lawmakers on Thursday overwhelmingly backed tighter gun control rules that make buying and possessing firearms more difficult across the 27-nation bloc.

Under the guidelines, updating rules from 1991, only people over 18 not deemed a threat to public safety can buy and keep guns. People under 18 will only be able to get hold of a gun for hunting or target shooting under the guidance of an adult with a valid license.

EU member states will be required to keep computer files with data on each firearm, such as type, model, caliber, serial number and names and addresses of both the supplier and the buyer, including on guns bought through the Internet. The registers must set up by 2014, and data will have to be kept for at least 20 years.

The name of manufacturer, place and year of fabrication and serial number will have to marked on every firearm. Historical collections of arms will be exempt from the new guidelines.

The measures, which still need to be formally approved by EU governments, are expected to come into force by January, the parliament said. All EU member states will then have two years to adopt them.

The parliamentary vote took place less than a month after an 18-year-old student went on a rampage in a school in southern Finland, killing eight people and himself. Although the legislation has been 18 months in the making, parliamentarians said they saw a pressing need to pass the new rules to prevent such massacres in the future.

"A 100-percent risk-free environment can never be created. But we can try to prevent events such as those in Finland or Germany," said Gisela Kallenbach, a German Green deputy charged with steering the legislation through the EU assembly. Germany has seen five tragic school shootings in the past seven years.

British Labour deputy Arlene McCarthy said the assembly sought a 'fast-track' adoption of the rules following the Finnish killings.

The new rules bring the EU into line with a U.N. protocol on firearms and harmonize the different gun control measures across the bloc.

In Finland, for example, 15-year-olds are allowed hunting rifle permits, and there are 1.6 million registered guns in a population of 5.3 million. In Britain, 17-year-olds may buy a shotgun if they have a gun certificate.

"Guns are not something young people should be getting hold of ... Recent dramatic events have shown just how necessary it is to have better control of the purchase and circulation of arms," said EU Commission Vice President Guenter Verheugen, a German.

"The conditions of use of firearms by persons less than 18 years old will be strictly controlled and the purchase of firearms by minors will be forbidden," he said.

Verheugen estimated there were "millions" of illegally-owned weapons in the EU.

"We have a tough job ahead of us trying to get these guns out of the system," he said.

Germany raised the age for owning recreational firearms from 18 to 21 after the massacre in a school in Erfurt in 2002 when a 19-year-old man killed 13 teachers, two former classmates and a policeman, before committing suicide.

Countries that have more stringent gun controls than the new minimum EU-wide standards will be allowed to keep them.

FACE, a Europe-wide association representing 7 million hunters, welcomed the new rules.

"It's an acceptable compromise. Real hunters will not be seriously affected," the organization said.

The sad thing is that the politicians (and the people in general?) in Europe, believe they can legislate themselves out of tragedies such as the school shootings in Finland, Germany and the UK. Every time such an incident takes place - and without a doubt it will again in the future - the calls will be for ever more draconian means of trying to avoid gun crime.

This obviously plays into the hands of the "antis" who will immediatly try to score the political brownie points and further their own cause. The net effect on gun crime will be nill, and we will be landed with ever more pervasive redtape to deal with. Once a bureaucratic procedure has been established (effective or not), we will never get rid of it again (witness France's continued prohibition of military calibers - a rule that makes ABSOLUTELY no sense these days).

Europe BADLY needs an equivalent of the NRA (political clout and all), but reality is that the European pro-gun organizations are weak and marginalized and always faced with the option of complete bans. So anything else may seem a "reasonable compromise" to them - regardless of whether the measures can be expected to have any effect whatsoever.

In Germany (which has some of the more draconian gunlaws of Europe), criminal misuse of legally owned weapons amounts to a couple of percent of the total. Any leglislation beyond what already exists should therefore attempt to target illegal guns. Sadly, criminals don't respect laws, and lawabiding citicens are faced with more and more stringent rules.

Don't forget: when all guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns! Look at what has happened in the UK in terms of crime - and gun crime in particular - since they introduced much stricter gunlaws. It was hardly the effect the politicians had expected, but have the (useless) gunlaws been repealed when they have been proven ineffective or even counter productive???

- mike

I really don´t see this as a problem. Looks like the new EU-wide laws will be very similar to those that we have had for about 15 years. Ours are maybe even tighter. If you are a decent citizen, you will have no problems buying any firearms.
Remembering what an idiot I was at the age of 15, I really think such punks should not have any access to firearms.

Perhaps the problem with most legislators, whether in the USA or Europe, is to look like they are doing something rather than actually doing something that will work. Every country in the world probably has hugely redundant laws whose main purpose was to give a politician or an institution some exposure at the time the law was promoted. No one has yet shown a cause and effect link between gun control and crime reduction. One can of course show the opposite.