A Gun Story

I occasionally will view state-run RBB....the Berlin network and their news.

They had a small piece on gun-ownership and trends in the Berlin region.

For those who might think that gun-ownership in Germany or Berlin itself is forbidden....well, no.  There are 26,000 people within the state of Berlin....who are registered gun owners.  No one splits these people off into male or female.....or sane versus insane.  These are people who took the course, passed the tests, and were granted the right to own a gun.  All this adds up to 123,500 runs within the state.  Well....legal guns, that is.

What RBB gets around to discussing that between 2010 and 2015 (five years), they had around 1840 people that they had to charge on weapons violations.  They are careful about how they say it....hinting only that it was incidents involving bodily harm, or illegal having weapons in possession.

RBB doesn't necessarily infer that of the 26,000 legal owners....that 1,840 legal owners were in some kind of violation.  In fact, they leave this type of statistic totally off the report.   So, one might assume that almost all of the 1,840 arrested folks.....were non-legal and illegally holding weapons in their possession or illegally threatening people with the guns.

You can do the statistical game with this....it comes out to roughly seven violations a week, in a town of 3.5 million people.

You can go and ask ten thousand Germans over the age of fifty.....how many times have you been stopped on the street or in your car.....and the cop asks to frisk you or check out your trunk.  I'd take a guess that fewer than fifty of the ten-thousand will say it's happened once in their life.  If you hang out at bars and pubs late, where drug trafficking occurs.....it's probably a much higher statistic of having a cop frisk or ask about the contents of your trunk.

Section 51 of the German gun code kinda specifies the amount of trouble that you can get into with illegal possession of weapons.  One to five years in prison is what the court would dish out.  If your use of the weapon was in the act of a "gain"?  Up to ten years in prison.  It's a simple and tough mess that you get into yourself into.....if you were to walk around with no license or an illegally procured gun.