Gun rights in Europe post Charlie Hebdo

[Snejdarek]

Again with respect, you could also argue they were fighting to regain their own country, using our tools

Dear throdgrain, I do accept that argument. I also understand that the Czechoslovak Government did sign agreements towards that purpose, and that pacta sunt servanda. I am grateful that the Czechs and Slovaks who made it to UK were given this opportunity to fight for what is right while those who got to Soviet Union were interned in camps until well later in the war.

However, if a point is made that Germans weren't the real losers of the war, on the background of the grand scheme of things, the paying off of the war equipment is a piece that fits into this puzzle.

 

[Cee Zee]

Who's tools??? Didn't a big part of what you English guys got for the war effort come from the US? Maybe they should have paid us instead of the Brits.

I know this can be a touchy subject but I would like to add some facts to the mix just in the interest of full disclosure. The Potsdam Conference and the Paris Treaties both laid out plans for reparations from various countries to various countries. The Germans did pay in some ways. They had little money left but they had other things. The US under the auspices of "Operation Paperclip" gained a great deal of "intellectual reparations" as they were called. In short we got to use all the research the Nazis did and had patent rights transferred to us. It amounted to about $10 billion according to estimates. We essentially took their entire engineering and development people and used them for our gain. Also the Germans were forced to provide labor to most of the Allies especially in Russia. But England, France and even the US benefited from free labor for quite a while. And the Germans lost many factories that were basically torn down and moved to western areas or just sold for scrap. All of these things were pretty much over by the early 50's even though Germany never came close to fulfilling the obligations they agreed to.

Strangely Hungary was made to pay to Russia, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. It amounted to about $100 million US. Italy was forced to pay quite a bit. But the most egregious agreements involved countries like Romania and Finland who were forced to pay the Soviets. It should have been the other way around but to the victors go the spoils I guess. It doesn't make it right.

The only country that fully paid all of the reparations from those Paris agreements was Finland.

And we have all heard this story - the main reason Germany wasn't put on the hook for huge reparations was because the reparations they were forced to pay after WWI pretty much led directly to WWII. You can't expect people to give up everything they work for while they starve to death. Yes the eastern Europeans were put under the thumb of the Soviets which milked them almost dry and that is really the worst thing to come out of the war IMO. It was out of the frying pan into the fire for the eastern countries. Some say Patton was killed because we feared he would start a war with the Russians. It was no secret that he felt the war wasn't over until we went toe to toe with the Russians. Who knows how much of that is true.

All I can say is if you think the Germans got off easy you should take a look at what the US did for the Japanese after the war. We didn't want a repeat of the WWI reparations problems so went head over heels the opposite direction in Japan. MacArthur was largely responsible for that. But it resulted in Japan being a decent ally for half a century and more. Yes they beat us in the economics game for a while but the US has a system that allows us to reinvent ourselves when things go bad. Now the Japanese are way behind us and it's parts of Europe that live well at our expense. I know many don't want to hear this but we put up the money to keep the Soviets out of western Europe and nobody ever even acknowledges it much less thanks us for it. I watch the BBC on my satellite setup and I get to see how the Brits make fun of us for buying cheap cars. It doesn't seem to occur to them that we spent our money on tanks that protect their rears (among lots of other military equipment). They spend very little on defense relatively speaking and they can afford "free" healthcare for everyone. I have to say they have been so in love with their PC lives and their open minds that their brains ran out and the Muslim radicals moved in. Doesn't sound so smart to me.

 

[hq]

The only country that fully paid all of the reparations from those Paris agreements was Finland.

That's correct, and it was a real knife-on-the-throat -situation. Soviet Union had calculated that there's no chance in h*ll Finland will be able to pay the demanded reparations and they could take over the whole country once a few payments have been missed. During some years they were over 15% of GNP. Surprisingly, by the fall of 1952 they were paid in full. A Soviet military base near Helsinki was dismantled and the area soviets occupied, nearly 100.000 acres, was returned to Finland in January 1956.

Interestingly enough, my summer house is in that area. Fantastic hunting ground for whitetail and roe deer, and there are ruins of a soviet dugout and trenches on my property, as a grim reminder of what once happened.

After WWII massive amounts of guns, explosives and even cannons "got lost", ie. stashed all over the country. Threat of soviet invasion and full occupation was very real and virtually all military weapons that could be "lost" without severe consequences or an absolute need to be accounted for, were. These stashes are still found and recovered today. Barns, basements and even graveyards are somewhat common places to find WWII guns dunked in cosmoline, and there are rumors of at least a few less than 30ft deep unmarked shallows near the coast where all diving is still strictly prohibited.

As far as WWII is concerned, I'd really like to have a word with whoever thought US "Lend-lease" program of providing military aid to Soviet Union was a great idea. It may be where my pristine Thompson M1928 found its way to my collection later on, but a lot of lend-lease gear was used by the red army in finnish front and finnish soldiers weren't too happy to find out about it...

 

[RetiredUSNChief]

Two comments about the gun situation in Europe, as I see it:

1. In general, there doesn't seem to be the same obsession about guns (pro or con) in Europe as there is in the States. I've heard numerous comments from Europeans regarding their surprise at the "gun mania" prevalent in America. This attitude, on the surface, is rather unexpected given Europe's recent history of wars, genocides, Resistance movements, etc. On the other hand, maybe Europeans are anxious to put those chapters behind them, or at least blot out the unpleasant memories.

2. That said, there is a wide discrepancy between the gun laws (generally very restrictive) and the actual situation on the ground. In other words, Europeans are much more willing to flaunt gun laws than are Americans. And underground gun ownership seems to be higher, in direct correlation with the severity of the gun laws. Unlike Americans, Europeans don't bitch and moan about restrictive gun laws -- instead, those that want them just get illegal guns. (Law enforcement, even in its published reports, is well aware of this.)

With respect, I'd recommend refraining from over-generalizing.

The UK is part of Europe...and as a rule they are NOT "much more willing to flaunt gun laws than are Americans".

Their culture is radically different than that of, for example, Finland, Switzerland, and many of the other nations we've been discussing here.

UK citizens have been indoctrinated on various aspects of gun control for generations, even before the 1998 debacle they went through. Entire classes of people in the UK are completely in line with gun control and violating their gun control laws is anathema.

This is, of course, not to say that there aren't people within the UK who disagree with and oppose the strict laws. But this is a far cry from willingly flaunting them.

British history, convoluted as it is on many things, has a long history of gun control. Some say it started back in 1903, but it was very clearly in existence long before their English Bill of Rights, which came out in 1689. The closest they came to something like our more recent Second Amendment was:

"That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;"

Note, however, that it ONLY referenced allowing Protestants having arms (a restoration because gun control laws of the time did not allow it), and ONLY of "defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law". In other words, ONLY if the government allowed it. It's not what we, in the U.S., would call an "unalienable right"...it's an "assigned right", which can be altered, limited, or eliminated at will by government.


To be fair, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 was about yanking a knot in the King's testes and limiting the King's powers. It wasn't really about individual rights, per se.


And even if they didn't have much restrictive gun control laws on the books at any other given time in their own country, they most certainly didn't have any such issues with restricting them elsewhere in their empire.


So please...don't make too broad a statement about "European countries" and their citizens because they are culturally and politically diverse on a great many aspects.

 

[Cee Zee]

You should remember that to FDR Stalin was "Uncle Joe". The leftist media had already covered for horrible conditions in the Ukraine perpetrated deliberately by the Stalinist forces in Russia. Let's face it. FDR was a wannabe commie himself.

But beyond that we saw Russia as an ally that was an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" sort of relationship. That's what the non-commie lovers thought. We didn't like the Russians. But there were a lot of them fighting one of the greatest evils of all time. Yes Russia went on to become as bad if not worse. Yes they treated our friends in eastern Europe horribly. But they were killing lots and lots of Germans. Again many Americans thought the war wouldn't be over until we had it out with Russia. We didn't forget they helped give Hitler his start. They were terrible. But yes we gave them the ability to fight back against Germany too. I really think the war could easily have ended with a different winner if we had not supported Russia the way we did. And I think many in Europe would have been worse off if Hitler had won.

British history, convoluted as it is on many things, has a long history of gun control. Some say it started back in 1903

You're right to say it goes back much further. Gun control in the colonies was one of the issues that sparked our revolution. We needed guns here with lots of friction still going on between Native Americans and the Europeans not to mention the wild animals that would attempt to break into people's homes to get their food. That was still going on long after the revolution. It's a big reason we have the 2A in fact.

 

[AlexanderA]

RetiredUSNChief wrote:

With respect, I'd recommend refraining from over-generalizing.

The UK is part of Europe...and as a rule they are NOT "much more willing to flaunt gun laws than are Americans".

Their culture is radically different than that of, for example, Finland, Switzerland, and many of the other nations we've been discussing here.

I disagree. Underground (illegal) guns are more prevalent in Britain than in places like Finland and Switzerland, that have more lax gun laws. That was my whole point. The more draconian the gun laws, the more pushback and flaunting of the law, by both criminals and otherwise law-abiding citizens.

For example:

The controversial ban on the ownership of handguns which was introduced after the Dunblane massacre has failed to halt an increasing number of crimes involving firearms.

An independent report, Illegal Firearms in the UK, to be published by the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College in London tomorrow, says that handguns were used in 3,685 offences last year compared with 2,648 in 1997, an increase of 40 per cent.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...espite-ban-brought-in-following-Dunblane.html

And:

Despite the country’s stringent gun laws, newspaper reports indicate that illegal handguns can be purchased for £50–100 (approximately US$70–155). In 2002 a Member of Parliament stated that there are some inner-city areas “in which it is now easier to buy an illegal gun than to find a taxi in the rain.” Newspapers reported that in the two years after the ban on handguns enacted after the Dunblane massacre the number of crimes in which handguns were carried increased by 40%.

According to news reports, the source of illegal firearms entering Britain is diverse, with many originating from within the EU and even as close by as Northern Ireland, with allegations that since the ceasefire paramilitary groups have been disposing of their surplus weapons. Reports also indicate that weapons are coming from as far afield as the US, Australia, and Argentina. Customs officers have noted that there has been an increase in the amount of weapons originating from Central and Eastern Europe.

http://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/greatbritain.php

And:

The number illegally owned is literally unknown - although it is known the numbers are rising with senior police officers such as Sir Paul Condon, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing fears of an emerging "gun culture" on the streets of Britain's inner cities. Estimates of illegal weapons range from 500,000 to a million or more, perhaps many more.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/are-we-hostages-to-gun-culture-1341917.html#

 

[RetiredUSNChief]

RetiredUSNChief wrote:

With respect, I'd recommend refraining from over-generalizing.

The UK is part of Europe...and as a rule they are NOT "much more willing to flaunt gun laws than are Americans".

Their culture is radically different than that of, for example, Finland, Switzerland, and many of the other nations we've been discussing here.

I disagree. Underground (illegal) guns are more prevalent in Britain than in places like Finland and Switzerland, that have more lax gun laws. That was my whole point. The more draconian the gun laws, the more pushback and flaunting of the law, by both criminals and otherwise law-abiding citizens.

I think you missed my point. My point addressed the citizens as a whole, not the criminal element within. The general citizenship is what we are generally talking about when it comes to the "right" of people to own firearms. It is the general population I am talking about when it comes to the issue of gun control and the acquiescence thereof.

The general population has been conditioned for generations to accept these restrictions, and therefore the general population is now quite happy to go along with them. So, as a rule, the general population does not have any significant fraction which is "much more willing to flaunt gun laws than are American" and there is no large "underground" ownership of firearms by otherwise law-abiding citizens.

Criminals are a different matter altogether.

 

[Cee Zee]

The general population has been conditioned for generations to accept these restrictions, and therefore the general population is now quite happy to go along with them.

I'm not that familiar with the underground gun ownership culture in the UK but I do know they seem to have a lot of rules governing everything about their lives. The US is working on going down that path but we aren't as far down that way as they are.

 

[hq]

I disagree. Underground (illegal) guns are more prevalent in Britain than in places like Finland and Switzerland, that have more lax gun laws. That was my whole point. The more draconian the gun laws, the more pushback and flaunting of the law, by both criminals and otherwise law-abiding citizens.

That is one interpretation, authorities everywhere seem to be reluctant to release detailed statistics. There's a HUGE difference in sentences for possession and/or manufacturing illegal guns; in UK there's a real chance of a life sentence for non-violent firearm offence - anyone remember Grant Wilkinson and MAC10 blank gun conversion scheme? Virtually all crimes involving firearms make at least local if not national headlines. In Finland, a typical sentence for manufacturing, possession and/or sale of multiple unregistered full automatic firearms is 24 months probation. Cases like that don't get much media attention and the police seem to focus on harassing legal gun owners, instead of illegal manufacturing and trade.

We also have to remember that UK is an island and hasn't signed the Schengen agreement, which means that border control between other EU countries is in place and strictly enforced. Crossing the border to Finland - or Switzerland, for that matter - happens by driving past an (usually) unmanned border guard station and you barely notice you've crossed a border. This may be nothing more but an educated guess, but IMO there's little chance that the sheer number of unlicensed, unregistered illegal firearms in the UK is even close to that of virtually any country in continental Europe.

 

[Cee Zee]

in UK there's a real chance of a life sentence for non-violent firearm offence

Gee freaking whiz! I knew the UK was strict but a "life sentence" for "non-violent" firearms offenses? That's harsh. That's really harsh.

I heard a lot of people say the murder rate went up a lot after the total ban of handguns in 1997. Do you have any insights on that? Did it really go up as much as I heard in places and has it stayed up if it did go up?

 

[hq]

I heard a lot of people say the murder rate went up a lot after the total ban of handguns in 1997. Do you have any insights on that? Did it really go up as much as I heard in places and has it stayed up if it did go up?

That's a very controversial topic. Crime rates were skyrocketing for years after the ban, in spite of preceding claims of the effect being quite the opposite, until 2004 when home office gave police precincts an official order NOT to release any of their statistics to anyone. Everything had to be routed through home office's "truth commission" and, magically, homicide rate went on a steady and rapid decline.

At one point I made a non-comprehensive study about this for the finnish parliament on behalf of the NRA. I came across several cases where leaked statistics from individual UK police precincts were factually 40-200%+ (!!!) higher than the official figures published by UK home office, year for year. I also got my hands on some highly sensitive material about individual cases; for example, one drive-by shooting where the intended victim survived but two innocent bystanders were killed was NOT A HOMICIDE, according to official UK statistics, because the intended victim lived. What UK government claims is an incredible load of horses**t, apparently intended to "prove" that their gun policy has worked as intended as means of reducing violent crime. They're lying through their teeth and their arrogance is unbelievable considering how many times they've been caught red handed with their doctored "statistics".

All governments do that to some degree. UK is definitely among the worst, right there with Russia, North Korea, Daesh (aka. isis) and others. What can you expect from a country with by far the highest density of government-controlled surveillance cameras in the world, one for every 14 UK citizens...

 

[RetiredUSNChief]

Oh, I remember Piers Morgan losing it to Larry Pratt on CNN when Larry pointed just this issue about UK violent crime out to him:

"You are an unbelievably stupid man, aren't you!"

Feel free to pass on this video, since just about anything having to do with Piers Morgan while he was on CNN was a broken record. But the closing comments were hilarious, too!

 

[hq]

Oh, I remember Piers Morgan losing it

Ah. While I'm reluctant to expressing any kind of comments that could be interpreted as ad hominem, "Piers Morgan" should be added to the list of words and expressions automatically translated into *:s on this forum. I've been suspecting for a long time that he's paralyzed from the neck up.

 

[RetiredUSNChief]

"paralyzed from the neck up"

HAHAHAHA!

Hope you don't mind me stealing that one!

 

[hq]

Hope you don't mind me stealing that one!

Please do. There's just no other politically (semi) correct way of describing some people.

 

[AlexanderA]

Snejdarek wrote:

AlexanderA wrote:

That said, there is a wide discrepancy between the gun laws (generally very restrictive) and the actual situation on the ground. In other words, Europeans are much more willing to flaunt gun laws than are Americans. And underground gun ownership seems to be higher, in direct correlation with the severity of the gun laws. Unlike Americans, Europeans don't bitch and moan about restrictive gun laws -- instead, those that want them just get illegal guns. (Law enforcement, even in its published reports, is well aware of this.)

I must say that this is not the situation in the Czech Republic. Getting the license and gun legally is easy to the point that having it illegally leads to presumption of one being either criminal or lunatic and very high probability that someone would sooner or later alert authorities. On the other hand when someone has guns legally, it is not an issue that should be thought about twice for most (even those who would never get guns themselves).

This actually reinforces what I'm trying to say. The basic fact is that people (a certain percentage of the population) will have guns, no matter what the laws. If, in the Czech Republic, gun laws are reasonable, that provides a safety valve and removes the incentive to violate the law. There's no reason for otherwise law-abiding people to break the law when they can get guns merely by complying with a few pro-forma requirements. (That's the situation in most of the U.S., btw.) On the other hand, the more draconian the gun laws, the greater the rate of non-compliance. Most of Europe has highly restrictive gun laws and equally high rates of non-compliance.

It's been said, elsewhere in this thread, that Britain is the exception to this rule, having both highly restrictive gun laws and a highly compliant (generally anti-gun) population. However, the traditional law-abiding British stereotype doesn't apply any longer. Immigration, especially from former British colonies, has changed the face of the country. These new arrivals, many of them Muslims, don't share the traditional British values or culture. Pakistanis in Britain, for example, don't seem to have any qualms about having illegal guns -- and according to police reports, they have them in abundance. It's been estimated that there are more than a million underground guns in Britain.

The lesson to be drawn here, worldwide, is that restrictive gun legislation has finite limits. If the laws overreach, people will simply ignore them. (Similar to what happened with alcohol prohibition.) Unenforceable laws increase contempt for laws in general, and this is not a good development in a society.

 

[hq]

However, the traditional law-abiding British stereotype doesn't apply any longer. Immigration, especially from former British colonies, has changed the face of the country. These new arrivals, many of them Muslims, don't share the traditional British values or culture.

I think it's not just the immigration that has changed the culture in UK. Very traditional and conformist middle and upper classes are still there, but "chav" culture has definitely changed the big picture. Working class in the UK has traditionally had problems with violence and during last 30 years or so, what's called social security class has grown both in numbers and the number of problems they cause.

I've had a lot of conversations about this with a friend of mine who is a retired high ranking police officer from greater London area. He's seen the change from 70's to this day first hand and now that he's retired, he just wants to move abroad because, in his words, "the whole country has turned to complete and utter $#!%" I don't blame him. I've spent quite a lot of time in the UK every now and then since the 80's and even as a tourist and business traveler, I've noticed that something is going terribly wrong, even though I haven't been able to pinpoint what it is. An increasing number of brits don't give a damn about personal responsibility anymore and behave accordingly. Orwellian nanny state has its consequences...

 

[Cee Zee]

The UK isn't the only European country that has messed things up so bad that the original culture types are moving on to other places leaving GB with the problems their PC policies have created. Aruba is the new home for many Dutch people for example. In the US we have our different states and they often have radically different values among their residents. People comfortable living in NYC would go nuts living where I do for example. I live in the heart of gun country IMO. I'm temporarily away from the really traditional areas but even here most people wouldn't dream of wanting to confiscate all guns. Of course the education system is working hard to change all that. The govt. has used the school system to create the PC culture. It's something I've worked hard to prove in my documentary film making. But that's a whole other thing. The point I wanted to make is that people in the US don't have to leave the country to find areas where their values are still the common values. At one point everyone I knew that lived a certain way ended up moving to California for example. We always thought that was a good arrangement. But now they want the rest of us to bail them out after their excesses. That ain't gonna happen though. We couldn't bail them out if we wanted to and we don't want to. Why pay them more retirement money than I could ever earn where I live in a wage paying job. And they think they should get to retire at 45 there too. And of course this comes back around to their views on guns. They have horrible crime rates and they don't seem to make the connection that coddling criminals and disarming the law abiding folks is a recipe for disaster.

 

[Thermactor]

The Russophobic invective in this thread is really making me bite my tongue.

 

[lykoris]

funny how the rules strictly enforced on other threads but this one runs rampant

 

[hq]

The Russophobic invective in this thread is really making me bite my tongue.

Phobia, as defined by clinical psychology, is an anxiety disorder that causes reaction similar to fear without a logical reason, or a reaction far disproportionate to actual threat.

Finland was a Grand Duchy of imperial Russia for over a century and after 32 years of finnish independence soviet Russia put quite an effort into getting the country back under their control in 1939. Last russian troops left Finland in 1956. We have THR members from at least Estonia and Czech Republic, which have far more recent experience of what Russia is capable of. It's safe to say that in this case nobody's concerned about any legitimate action Russia might initiate, the reality can be far more sinister than that and there's plenty of history to justify prejudice against literally everything that happens on the other side of our eastern borders.

Trade with Russia can be great, but once Kreml even thinks that you've stepped on their toes, anything can happen. Just ask the ukrainians. It's not phobia. It's not even fear. It's self preservation instinct and countering force with force if the history happens to repeat itself.

 

[Snejdarek]

The Russophobic invective in this thread is really making me bite my tongue.

I don't see any Rusophoby here. If anyone touched Russian issues, it was mostly in connection with
(1) WW2 and its outcome (including the fact that many US made firearms that were supplied to the Soviet Union may still be found in Europe today),
(2) occupation of Eastern Europe by Soviet Communist forces and impact it had on the population, including gun culture,
(3) current happenings at Ukraine and their impact on gun culture, especially in countries like Estonia and Finland.

According to Wikipedia (citing Edmund Bourne, 2011), phobia is a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational. Pardon me but I don't see any invective nor Russophobia here.

The fact is that while the original line was mainly connected with the issue of impact of terrorism on European gun culture and gun laws, our friends from Finland and Estonia quite fittingly pointed out that the big neighbor is what drives gun culture, both legal (mainly through militia and guerrilla training) and illegal (through stockpiling of unregistered guns) in their part of Europe. Some posts may have ventured a bit in other directions, but even those still remained connected with guns or civil liberties issues.

I live in the center of Europe and still I learned quite a great deal about gun issues and civil liberties issues in various European countries from this thread. I would really like to believe that saying out loud that in many parts of Europe the gun culture is to a large degree shaped by past and recent encounters of Soviet/Russian soldiers venturing beyond the border of their own country (or just going heavily armed on holidays, as is the current official story) is not something that one should fear of doing for being banned or having a thread locked on this forum.

 

[Medusa]

I was thinking about commenting on that, HQ, but decided against it. It would be pointless because we live in different world, especially when the media is concerned. What gets covered and how. Just a remark, if the worst scenario happens, then we with HQ would not have to drive 5000 miles to shoot the enemy. I personally would not even have to leave my house.

I'd say this thread is a very polite one.

 

[Snejdarek]

To get back to the original topic, after our Belgian police force "disposed" of a terrorist cell last thursday, police officers are mostly allowed to take their service handguns home with them (actually, the government, cowards as they are, decided it was up to the local police chief to decide if his personel were allowed to take their side-arms home ) and some Jewish representatives asked for a privilege gun law.

Vaupet, could you please elaborate on the legal background of this? Does the law provide for possibility of the government/royalty to just decide that some elements of society (off duty police officers) can be suddenly armed? Or is it just saying out loud that they will not prosecute them for breaking the law by taking their service weapons? Do they have to open or conceal carry?

I mean, in the Czech Republic when the shift is over, there is no way for the cop to take his service weapon with him. If he wants a private gun, he needs to get a license first the same as anyone else. (Which sometimes leads to funny situations - civilian safe handling procedure on the exam is apparently different from what the cops train, I had an examiner ask a cop on exam I attended to show his credentials after he did the cop procedure, if he wouldn't the examiner would make him retake the exam)

 

[Cee Zee]

Russophobic invective

Anyone who isn't scared of what the Russians are capable of doing hasn't been paying much attention. Am I using invective to describe that? I hope so. I'll put you in contact with my friends in St. Petersburg if you like (not the one in Florida). They will share some invectves with you I'm sure.