PA Bill Number: HR541
Title: Recognizing the month of October 2024 as "Domestic Violence Awareness Month" in Pennsylvania.
Description: A Resolution recognizing the month of October 2024 as "Domestic Violence Awareness Month" in Pennsylvania.
Last Action:
Last Action Date: Sep 27, 2024
Getting a gun legally in Europe may be hard, but terrorists have little trouble :: 02/25/2015
COPENHAGEN — Europe, a continent long known for the rarity of gun violence, is confronting twin challenges that give the issue sudden urgency: a growing population of radicalized young men determined to strike targets close to home, and a black market awash in high-powered weapons.
The problem has been rendered vividly in recent weeks by a pair of deadly assaults that each paralyzed a European capital. In Paris and Copenhagen, the attacks were carried out by former small-time criminals turned violent extremists who obtained military-grade illicit weapons with apparent ease.
[5 countries where police officers do not carry firearms — and it works well]
In contrast with the free-firing United States, Europe is generally seen as a haven from serious gun violence. Here in Denmark, handguns and semiautomatic rifles are all but banned. Hunting rifles are legally available only to those with squeaky-clean backgrounds who have passed a rigorous exam covering everything from gun safety to the mating habits of Denmark’s wildlife.
“There’s a book about 1,000 pages thick,” said Tonni Rigby, one of only two licensed firearms dealers in Copenhagen. “You have to know all of it.”
But if you want an illicit assault rifle, such as the one used by a 22-year-old to rake a Copenhagen cafe with 28 bullets on Saturday, all it takes are a few connections and some cash.
“It’s very easy to get such a weapon,” said Hans Jorgen Bonnichsen, a former operations director for the Danish security service PET. “It’s not only a problem for Denmark. It’s a problem for all of Europe.”
European leaders have made tighter controls on weapons trafficking a priority in recent weeks, following the killing of 17 people in Paris by three attackers. The shootings in Copenhagen this past weekend, which left two people dead, raised the ominous prospect of copycat attacks across Europe.
But officials acknowledge there is no clear solution. The same open-border policies that allow people and goods to flow freely across the continent also make it extremely difficult to crack down on illegal weapons — a fact that arms dealers have been all too eager to exploit.
“You can find Kalashnikovs for sale near the train station in Brussels,” acknowledged a Brussels-based European Union official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. “They’re available even to very average criminals.”
In the case of the Paris attackers, they were able to obtain an entire arsenal: AK-47 assault rifles, pistols, a Skorpion submachine gun and even a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. All of it was purchased in Brussels for about $5,000, according to Belgian media reports.
The availability of such weapons in the heart of Western Europe isn’t new. The flood of high-powered weaponry began with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued through the 1990s as war raged across the Balkans. Many of the weapons from those periods are still circulating. They have lately been supplemented by an influx from the turmoil in North Africa, with weapons smuggled on ships across the Mediterranean.
The guns have been used primarily by criminal gangs that turn them on one another during periodic turf wars.
But beginning with attacks in the French city of Toulouse in 2012 that left seven people dead, guns have also become the weapon of choice for Islamist terrorists in Europe.
That’s a shift from the last decade, when bombs were used in mass-casualty attacks on transit systems in London and Madrid.
The new tactics may reflect the lone-wolf nature of the recent assailants, who seem to have operated with relative autonomy and not as part of centrally directed terrorist plots.
Analysts say explosives can be easier to detect than guns and are harder to transport and assemble. Guns also require less expertise, allowing even petty gangsters such as Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein, the assailant in Copenhagen, to carry out deadly strikes.
The use of guns has enabled terrorists to pick their victims more precisely. In Paris and Copenhagen, the targets were the same: cartoonists, police officers and Jews.
Guns have also been the weapon of choice in other recent lone-wolf attacks carried out in Ottawa and Sydney, suggesting the problem is hardly limited to Europe.
