Europe's restrictive gun laws may make the American pro-gun lobby recoil like a blunderbuss, but European governments hardly care. They maintain that limiting gun ownership to hunters, collectors and gun-club members has helped keep firearm homicide rates much lower than those of the U.S. According to figures recently compiled by the British Home Office, the European Union's average homicide rate per 100,000 people in 1997-99 was 1.7, compared to 6.26 in the U.S. — and 20.52 in Russia.
Experts can argue about how much of those differences are due to the restricted availability of guns in Europe and how much to a cultural proclivity to lower levels of violence. But no one can argue that gun deaths can be legislated out of existence. The tragic shooting in Erfurt last month and in Nanterre in March, both perpetrated by gun-club members, show that even Europe's tough laws cannot keep guns out of the reach of murderous individuals. And the most detailed ownership laws don't even touch on illegal weapons, which are now washing over Western Europe. Last week French police in the southern city of Castres seized scores of automatic weapons, machine guns, revolvers, a pair of bazookas and two dozen rockets in a raid on a villa linked to the Basque terror organization ETA. "People often wonder what kind of money it takes to buy that kind of arsenal," says a French police official. "I'm more worried that people can buy them at all."
On April 26, the very day that Robert Steinhäuser used a 9-mm pistol to shoot 16 others and then himself in Erfurt, legislators in Berlin's Bundestag were passing a hotly discussed revision of Germany's 1972 gun law. The revised law would require new permits for ammunition, make police clearance mandatory even for owners of blank pistols and set tighter rules for storing guns. It would also lower the age, from 12 to 10, at which young members of gun clubs can handle air guns. That morning conservative parliamentarians Hartmut Koschyk and Erwin Marschewski expressed their regret that the new law burdened "law-abiding hunters, shooters and collectors" with "a nonsensical tightening of rules."
By that afternoon, the Erfurt massacre had rendered the new law all but moot. It is unlikely that the Bundesrat will sign off on it without wholesale revisions, including possibly hiking the legal age for shooters from 18 to 21. Last week Jürgen Kohlheim, vice president of the German Marksmen's Association, acknowledged that raising age limits rather than lowering them would be a more likely future trend. And his organization suggested that permits for target-shooting rifles ought not to enable purchase of pump-action shotguns. Steinhäuser, 19, was able to buy one of those on the strength of his shooting-club membership, even though he wasn't known to use it on the shooting range. He did not fire it in his killing spree, perhaps because it jammed.
