Politicians criticize unclear wording in the law. According to a report, around a thousand extremists in Germany have a gun permit. Among them are people who have already been classified as potential terrorists by the authorities, the ARD magazine “Report Mainz” reported, citing its own survey among the interior ministries of the federal states, according to a statement on Wednesday.
For example, two men are noted on an internal list of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 2012 as people with “right-wing terrorist approaches”. Both are active sports shooters, one of them has a gun license and an explosives license. He takes part in shooting competitions all over Europe. In the 1990s he was a member of a Nazi group.
At that time, numerous illegal weapons were found on him, including a shotgun. To this day, there are references to the right-wing extremist scene. In his tattoo studio, he openly displays pictures of tattoos with Nazi symbols. The responsible weapons authority informed “Report Mainz” that there were “no findings” that would have opposed a weapons permit .
The Greens member of the Bundestag and domestic politician Marcel Emmerich criticized the gun law in “Report Mainz” as insufficient to disarm extremists. “This is something where we make fools of ourselves as a state,” he said. “Our authorities must have the necessary means at hand to end this.” The reason for this is, among other things, unclear formulations in gun law. According to the law, criminals lose their weapons above a certain limit, but this only applies to extremists “as a rule”. That allows the courts a lot of leeway, said Emmerich.
The Hessian Interior Minister Peter Beuth (CDU) also called for a change in the gun law. “These are legal subtleties, but these subtleties mean that we have requirements in the Weapons Act that do not allow us (…) to deprive the extremists of their weapons,” he said.
“We all don’t want to imagine that there will have to be more deaths before clear standards are actually formulated,” added Stephan Kramer, head of the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
