revelarts
11-14-2015, 12:45 AM
How AK-47s Get to Paris
France bans most guns. So where did the Paris attackers get their assault weapons from?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/this-is-how-ak-47s-get-to-paris.html
....France outlaws most gun ownership and it’s almost impossible to legally acquire a high-powered rifle such as an AK-47, so where did the weapons in the Nov. 13 terror attack—not to mention the bloody January assault by Islamic terrorists on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo magazine and the 2012 shootings by a militant in Toulouse— come from?
The answer: Eastern Europe, most likely, where the trafficking of deadly small arms is big, shady business. And where local authorities find it difficult to intervene.
The French government and the European Union know they have a foreign gun problem. But as the chain of attacks illustrates, efforts to tamp down on the flow of weapons have, so far, failed to disarm terrorists.
French police reportedly seized more than 1,500 illegal weapons in 2009 and no fewer than 2,700 in 2010. The number of illegal guns in France has swelled by double-digit percentages annually for several years, Al Jazeera reported (http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/1/9/guns-france-armstraffickig.html), citing figures from Paris-based National Observatory for Delinquency.
The seizures likely made just a tiny dent in the pool of available weapons. “The fact that a Kalashnikov or a rocket launcher can be acquired for as little as 300 to 700 Euros in some parts of the E.U. indicates their ready availability for [organized crime groups], street gangs or groups orchestrating high-profile attacks resulting in significant numbers of casualties,” Europol, the E.U.’s law-enforcement agency, explained in a policy brief.
Many of the weapons flow from Russia via the Balkan states into the rest of Europe including France. Russian firms manufactured the guns and supplied them to armed groups battling each other in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. When those conflicts ended in the mid-to-late-1990s, the weapons remained—as many as six million of them, according to the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey (PDF (http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/G-Issue-briefs/SAS-AV-IB4-Western-Balkans.pdf)).
Correctly anticipating foreign demand for military-grade weaponry, traffickers defied half-hearted efforts on the part of governments to remove guns from circulation. “Most of the legislation in the region is still in its early stages and untested,” Small Arms Survey concluded.And on a Friday night in November, heavily-armed terrorists opened fire yet again, in a lawful country with few legal guns that has the misfortune to be surrounded by lawless countries ... with lots of guns....
A horrible reminder that if you ban guns only the bad guys will have guns.
France bans most guns. So where did the Paris attackers get their assault weapons from?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/13/this-is-how-ak-47s-get-to-paris.html
....France outlaws most gun ownership and it’s almost impossible to legally acquire a high-powered rifle such as an AK-47, so where did the weapons in the Nov. 13 terror attack—not to mention the bloody January assault by Islamic terrorists on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo magazine and the 2012 shootings by a militant in Toulouse— come from?
The answer: Eastern Europe, most likely, where the trafficking of deadly small arms is big, shady business. And where local authorities find it difficult to intervene.
The French government and the European Union know they have a foreign gun problem. But as the chain of attacks illustrates, efforts to tamp down on the flow of weapons have, so far, failed to disarm terrorists.
French police reportedly seized more than 1,500 illegal weapons in 2009 and no fewer than 2,700 in 2010. The number of illegal guns in France has swelled by double-digit percentages annually for several years, Al Jazeera reported (http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/1/9/guns-france-armstraffickig.html), citing figures from Paris-based National Observatory for Delinquency.
The seizures likely made just a tiny dent in the pool of available weapons. “The fact that a Kalashnikov or a rocket launcher can be acquired for as little as 300 to 700 Euros in some parts of the E.U. indicates their ready availability for [organized crime groups], street gangs or groups orchestrating high-profile attacks resulting in significant numbers of casualties,” Europol, the E.U.’s law-enforcement agency, explained in a policy brief.
Many of the weapons flow from Russia via the Balkan states into the rest of Europe including France. Russian firms manufactured the guns and supplied them to armed groups battling each other in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. When those conflicts ended in the mid-to-late-1990s, the weapons remained—as many as six million of them, according to the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey (PDF (http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/G-Issue-briefs/SAS-AV-IB4-Western-Balkans.pdf)).
Correctly anticipating foreign demand for military-grade weaponry, traffickers defied half-hearted efforts on the part of governments to remove guns from circulation. “Most of the legislation in the region is still in its early stages and untested,” Small Arms Survey concluded.And on a Friday night in November, heavily-armed terrorists opened fire yet again, in a lawful country with few legal guns that has the misfortune to be surrounded by lawless countries ... with lots of guns....
A horrible reminder that if you ban guns only the bad guys will have guns.