The EU "failures" discussed below are emblematic of the inadequacy of socialism, which, at its core, believes that true security comes from taking things away from people, which they believe to be necessary to insure the primacy of the state. Consequently, every policy failure encountered on the road to egalitarian heaven is responded to by largely symbolic actions that are more meant to placate the fears of the populace than to change either the dynamics of the crisis or the underlying causes of the crisis.
Heaven forbid that a debate actually occur regarding the inadequacy of the socialist inspired experiment of multi-culturalism and how to move past it. Or that there be a discussion of the simmering anger within Europe's indigenous Moslem populations who have failed to successfully assimilate into western culture. Or at the ever increasing latent anger of the non-Moslem population toward the followers of Islam, who are becoming viewed as pampered thugs allowed to rape and murder with impunity. Heck no, let's pass a new law tightening people's access to blank firing and non-firing weapons.
This all looks like a bizarre parody of the life and times of Robin Hood: rob from the rich and give to the poor, while the sherif of Nottingham tries to contain the rising violence by outlawing the possession of long bows...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/euro...ernational
Where did the weapons used in the 2015 terror attacks in Paris come from? Files from the ongoing investigation now make it possible to follow the trail. Years of EU shortcomings helped the firearms on their way.
The first day was May 21, 2008, the day the European Union announced it was planning to push through stricter rules pertaining to assault rifles. The regulations would allow weapons aficionados to decorate their living rooms with assault rifles if they so desired, but only if they had been deactivated such that they could never again be used to fire live ammunition. The EU said that the new guidelines would contain extremely strict technical standards for such deco-weapons.
But then nothing happened -- for six years and 233 days...
As early as 2013, though, Slovakian police had warned Europe how easy it was to reactivate such modified weapons so that they could once again exert deadly force. The EU knew about it, talked about it and recognized the danger. But did nothing. Until Jan. 9, 2015 when Coulibaly shot and killed four people with such a weapon. Officials in Brussels have since come to the realization about just how easy it is in Europe to obtain an automatic weapon capable of firing live ammunition -- and how difficult it is for the authorities to take action against the flourishing black market...
In total, Islamists wielding firearms killed 150 people and wounded 400 in Western Europe in 2015. That includes the January attacks in Paris on the editorial offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and on the Jewish supermarket. It includes the November massacre in the Bataclan and the Kalashnikov attacks on Paris street cafés. It includes the February attack on a synagogue and café in Copenhagen. And the failed, would-be mass murder on the high-speed Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris. As the attacks in Brussels on Tuesday have once again made clear, Europe and the Europeans have lost their sense of security: The hope that they could keep terror at bay has been exposed as an illusion. The symbol for this lack of security is the illegal weapons market -- a market that the authorities do not have under control...
When European terrorists are looking to acquire a tool of murder, they have a wide range of choices available to them...
An international team of journalists belonging to the newly established European Investigative Collaboration, of which SPIEGEL is a member, spent the last three months searching for clues. The reporting has revealed the first precise look at the weapons used in the January and November attacks in Paris and has led to weapons traders and to an alleged French police informant who apparently supplied part of Coulibaly's arsenal. The reporting also shows how easy it would be for terrorists to obtain weapons in Germany as well -- and how one of Germany's most dangerous right-wing extremists did exactly that...
The research reveals years of European Union failures...
Weapons laws in EU member states were to become stricter in the awake of the terror attacks and controls were to be strengthened...
The result was a modification to the directive in May 2008, "The Commission shall ... issue common guidelines on deactivation standards and techniques to ensure that deactivated firearms are rendered irreversibly inoperable..."
but the directive lacks two elements -- First, a date by which all EU member states were to have fulfilled the EU standards. And second, alarm weapons were left out: distress flares, starter pistols and blank-firing guns, all weapons where everything in the rear part of the weapon is still fully functional, including the magazine and the breechblock. Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to fire blanks.
Such weapons are used in films, for firing salutes and by all kinds of crazies and showoffs who want to let out their inner Rambo. For the EU, these...were a blind spot...not considered firearms because they did not expel bullets from their barrels, but they also didn't fall under the category of deactivated weapons because they still went "boom."
The new 2008 directive contained a fundamental absurdity. It announced strict regulations for weapons that, due to having been deactivated, could no longer shoot -- the decorative weapons. But the EU paid no attention to how live weapons could be transformed into alarm weapons: guns that could still shoot, even if only blanks. Yet it was exactly this category of weapon that was much more interesting for terrorists and other criminals...On the contrary...an entire arsenal of once active weapons that had been modified to fire blanks...were easier to re-modify such that they could again fire live ammunition.
In September 2013, EU member state Slovakia sent out an alert -- in English so that it could be understood everywhere. Slovakia had particularly weak regulations when it came to the modification of deadly weapons into alarm weapons. Two metal pegs in the barrel were considered sufficient. The Slovakian authorities were concerned and they published a poster with 16 images. The poster noted that alarm weapons from Slovakia were being "reactivated increasingly often." All it took, the poster noted, was "simple modifications:" simply removing the two pegs from the gun barrel. It was also extremely easy to purchase such weapons at stores. Buyers only had to be 18 years old and present a valid ID. The poster showed a pistol that that had been transformed into a blank-firing weapon by a company called Kol Arms and a Ceska vz.58 automatic rifle that had undergone the same procedure. Both weapons were later reactivated.
The message was heard in Brussels. In October 2013, just a month after the Slovakian warning, a European Commission report noted that law enforcement authorities in the EU were concerned that "alarm guns, air weapons and blank-firers are being converted into illegal lethal firearms." The Commission, the report stated, was aware of "significant differences in deactivation standards between Member States" and that homicides had been committed using such weapons. The report concluded that it was necessary to "evaluate the necessity of legally binding common standards for the whole EU."
The report came fully five years after the 2008 Firearms Directive, yet virtually nothing had been done. Now, an evaluation was to take place. When that evaluation was finally completed at the end of 2014, Brussels had succumbed to an oversight: According to EU definitions, deactivation standards only apply to firearms that are made totally unusable. Alarm weapons were again left out. The Slovak alert had fallen through the bureaucratic cracks.
In May 2014, there was a meeting in Brussels of EU experts on the weapons black market. When asked about what the consequences were for countries that did not fully implement the 2008 directive, an official with the Directorate-General Enterprise and Industry replied that there had only been a couple of inquiries and that no further steps had been taken. The... directive was consistent with the "minimum harmonization principle" -- which means there was plenty of leeway...
The principle that the EU only regulates what is really necessary keeps the union together and people happy. But when it comes to EU security, the principle costs human lives. The freedom of movement for persons and goods becomes laxity, laxity becomes carelessness and carelessness becomes deadly risk...
"This kind of reverse modification is much easier than for weapons that have been completely deactivated because it only involves the barrel," a ballistics expert with the Paris police wrote. One can obtain such weapons "via the Internet and in the mail." The extra short model, called a Subcompact, costs slightly more than €500. The longer version, known as Compact, costs between €230 and €280...
The guns are mostly decommissioned weapons from the Slovak military...For the lawless, however, they were the hottest new thing on the market. AFG sold an estimated 14,000 alarm weapons abroad, mostly over the Internet, according to the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). The agency currently has 33 open investigations into customers in Germany.
Many of the shop's customers apparently appreciated how quickly the weapons could be re-converted into active firearms. French investigators recently tried it out for themselves: It took only two hours for a locksmith of modest talent to reopen the barrel...
The Zastavas used in the Paris attack didn't come out of the Slovakian supply chain: They're weapons of the sort that terrorists in Western Europe have always clamored to get their hands on -- old automatic weapons from the Balkans that were never deactivated. There are believed to be almost as many of these faux Kalashnikovs as there are people in the region -- people with very little money and who sell the weapons in order to make some...
It's also possible that German weapons from the stockpiles of East Germany's National People's Army may have fallen into the wrong hands. During a meeting last September of the EU's Standing Committee on Internal Security (COSI), a French official noted that "the perpetrators at Charlie Hebdo used an automatic rifle from the former GDR." The ballistic reports, which have been obtained by SPIEGEL, provide no evidence to suggest this however. Germany's Left Party made an official request for a response to the claim by the German government, but officials stated that they would not comment "about the origins and dissemination of the weapons because there was still an open investigation." Still, it wouldn't come as a surprise if German weapons had made their way into terrorists' hands. MPi-Ks, the East German version of the Kalashnikov, have surfaced several times in Belgium. It is believed they came from the Balkans and that they had been sawed apart and then welded back together. Belgian security sources claim that decommissioned East German weapons were also sold to parties in the civil war.
As for the Bulgarian Kalashnikov used in the Bataclan attacks, it's also possible that it came straight from Bulgaria. As is the case in many former Eastern Bloc countries, Bulgaria is home to massive warehouses filled with stockpiles of old guns. For one study, Bulgaria reported a surplus of more than 46,000 small arms and light weapons. For years, the standard practice for these countries had been to sell whatever could be sold and to destroy what was left over. It's a rule of thumb apparently also followed by Romania (which has a surplus of 1.25 million weapons), Albania (259,000) Serbia (90,000) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (53,000).
But those are only the weapons to be found in government arsenals. It's possible that the weapons supplies of private individuals are even larger. When Albanians plundered their army's warehouses in 1997, 550,000 weapons and more than 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition went missing.
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