“Until now, keeping track of weapons has been the duty of 551 different local authorities and much of the information was held on paper,” the local.de reports from Germany. “But civil servants in Cologne have been collating and computerising the data since April, and the national database should be live from January 1.” I’m sorry but not even German civil servants are that efficient. More to the point, why? What’s the point of a national firearms registration scheme? To protect the public, of course!
The new database would offer a ‘considerable improvement to safety in Germany,’ said Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, who has been in charge of the project, which also fulfils EU guidelines that member states should adopt by 2014.
Yup. National gun registration EU wide. To find out how gun registration makes the Eurozone residents safer let’s ask the experts . . .
Police trade union GdP welcomed the register, saying it would mean officers called out to a disturbance would be able to check whether a gun was registered at the location. Such information could save lives, said GdP head Bernhard Witthaut.
[FYI Chicago Mayor Richard Daley used the exact same rationale to justify the Windy City’s registration scheme.]
B-b-b-b-ut what about the possibility of firearms confiscation leading to the rise of a fascist state? It’s not as if Germany doesn’t have a history of gun confiscation leading to the death of six million Jews or anything. Oh wait. It does.
What were those Germans called back in the day? Socialists. And you’ll be pleased to know (or not) that the reunited Fatherland still has some of them hanging about. Guess how they feel about the firearms registration scheme . . .
Socialist party Die Linke voiced concern that Friedrich had been too hasty in launching the facility. MP Frank Tempel said he was worried that it would not be able to completely replace the old system in January.
Again with the bureaucratic efficiency. Mach schnell! As far as that whole balancing pubic safety with the right to self-defense thing, ha!
Gun crime, never high in Germany when compared with many other countries, dropped considerably over the past decade – in 2000, police registered 19,400 crimes in which involved a firearm. By 2011, this figure stood at 11,700.
Of the 2011 statistics, 5,600 were shootings and 132 were incidents in which a gun was involved in a murder, manslaughter or assisted suicide investigation.
Don’t worry, something has been done! And something will be done once this system is in place. Quite how that plays out is anybody’s guess but I can’t think of one scenario where freedom, liberty or human rights are improved.
Of course, Europeans surrendered their gun rights a long time ago. This simply seals the deal. President Obama’s re-election be damned. American exceptionalism never looked so good as it does right now.