Brandenburg’s Interior Minister Michael Stübgen (CDU) supports the push by three federal states for stricter gun laws in the fight against extremists. At the same time, he also sees possible legal problems for implementation. At the conference of interior ministers, the states of Baden-Württemberg, Saxony-Anhalt and Hesse want to ensure that members of anti-constitutional associations no longer have access to pistols and rifles under any circumstances.
“It’s an additional attempt to disarm extremists,” Stübgen told the German Press Agency in Potsdam at the interior ministers’ conference in Munich on Wednesday. “We agree to the project, but it will be legally difficult to implement.” The aim of the present application is based on the fact that in future membership in an extremist organization should be sufficient to confiscate weapons without a personal individual decision. “Of course, there are also constitutional concerns that still need to be examined.”
Stübgen said: “We must do everything to ensure that extremists do not legally have weapons.” With the help of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Brandenburg is working intensively on taking away the weapons from extremists or that they do not receive a gun license at all. “We’re quite successful there, we’ve confiscated three-figure weapons from extremists over the past two years,” said Stübgen.
On the background of the country advance: Weapons and ammunition may only be owned by those who are legally reliable. The Weapons Act differentiates between the so-called rule unreliability (in the sense of “usually”) and absolute unreliability. In the case of the absolute unreliability of weapons law, under no circumstances may a permit be granted. This applies, for example, to people who have been convicted of a crime in the past ten years.
Current or former membership in a banned association, an unconstitutional party or an anti-constitutional association is currently still attested as unreliable. However, extremists often objected and thus undermined the gun ban, according to the CDU-led Ministry of the Interior in Baden-Württemberg. Therefore, according to the ideas of the three countries, such memberships should in future justify an absolute unreliability in terms of weapons law – which would make it significantly more difficult to object.
Weapons Act §5
