“This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!”
- Quote from Adolph Hitler in 1935 on The Weapons Act (Germany)
It's an interesting story out of Germany.....the nation is fairly close now to a national database of guns and gun owners.
To be honest, over the last fifty-odd years.....every community police station had a paper trail of gun ownership. If you went to the chief of police and asked him to list all the owners.....he could pull out a paper listing (usually cards), and that made everyone happy.
Well....we've come to a point where a digital database was the German goal. Sometime early in 2013, all of the six million privately held guns in Germany will be in a national database. From this, the 551 local 'counties' in Germany can now draw a serial number of person's name.
Is it actually an improvement? If you had a crime committed by someone with a certain type pistol....it might help start a nation-wide investigation. However, this listing only has the owners who admitted ownership. The guys who bought four guns from a mafia guy a decade ago? No.....his weapons won't be there. The guy who got a Russian hunting rifle last year from a private collector in Moscow? Well...no, his weapon probably won't be in the database.
How many illegal guns exist in Germany? No one is sure. I'd take a humble guess and state it's probably over one million. Some are guns left over from World War II and guys just stored them in their basement without ever saying anything.
I can understand the basis of wishing a database would help....but in this case....it's probably worthless.
The quote I put up? Yeah, it's from Hitler. The Nazi regime figured out early in the 1930s that private gun ownership could eventually be a problem. They didn't want anyone coming out in the evening hours and conducting a vendetta. So guns had to be controlled.
Some Germans will be proud over the event and say they are closer to a protective society. Frankly, if they lowered the speed limit on autobahns to 90 kph....they'd save a thousand lives a year, but they don't want to take that measure under consideration....so there are limits to just how many folks you'd like to save and how you do it.
Actually the statement about autobahns is not right. We can look at the statistics for death by traffic. 2011 4009 people died by car accident, of which 60,9% died on the country roades, not on the autobahn. Reduce the amount of people dying in city traffic and the autobahn accounts for a really really low amount of traffic deaths. Most times its not even the speed, but a "Stau" or a defect, which triggers the accident. Putting speed limits wouldnt help, I would even assume it would increase the number of car accidents on the autobahn.
ReplyDeleteOn topic of the pistols, well, I think it is more useful then the paper sheets. If gun registration is useful or not I leave open to discussion, I think nobody should have guns, but this is an utopia ;)