Crime: Germany announces plans for gun registry

Germany's parliament is establishing a weapons registry. The decision came on the tenth anniversary of a school massacre, but is part of an EU plan for Europe-wide gun registration.

On the morning of April 26, 2002, a 19-year-old who had been expelled from Gutenberg High School in the eastern German city of Erfurt began a deadly rampage. Over the course of two hours, he systematically stalked his former school's corridors and classrooms. The perpetrator killed 12 teachers, one secretary, one police officer and two students before taking his own life. Germany's first school shooting put the country into a state of shock, and triggered an earnest debate on how to toughen gun laws.

Exactly ten years after the massacre, Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, decided to establish a central weapons registry. It will gather information from the 600 offices that issue weapons permits throughout Germany in one place.

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Chiefs’defence of gun registry

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair makes a compelling case for supporting Canada’s long-gun registry: we register vehicles, so why wouldn’t we register something as potentially deadly as rifles and shotguns?

“It is not a matter of ideology. It’s just a matter of public safety,” said Blair, speaking as president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.

It should not fall to a police chief to explain that simple distinction between ideology and safety, but with a critical parliamentary vote approaching next month to kill the long-gun registry, Blair felt compelled to do it. In today’s political climate, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper has poisoned every national policy debate with partisanship, experts are no longer to be trusted; inconvenient facts are ignored; and critics are muzzled or sidelined.

Now, Harper’s Conservatives have attacked the association by claiming it does not “speak for Canadian police officers on this issue.”

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