Strict new European gun-control regulations will take another step on Thursday when a committee of the European Parliament votes on a set of measures. The Parliament and the European Commission already have agreed to the proposal in principle. Prompted by terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen, these regulations would prohibit the civilian use of most semiautomatic firearms. As is typical of such laws, however, they will do nothing to prevent the kind of attacks being used to justify them.
The proposed Firearms Directive would, among other things, ban various semiautomatic guns and magazines greater than 10 or 20 rounds, depending on the length of the gun. The goal appears to be to ban semiautomatic guns that can “easily be converted” to automatic weapons.
But the directive completely misunderstands how guns work. Semiautomatic guns can’t be easily converted into machine guns. The firing mechanisms are different.
Semiautomatic weapons fire only one bullet with each pull of the trigger and then reload themselves, making them good for self-defense. With a single-shot rifle that requires the user to manually reload, you could be in trouble if you miss your first shot or are faced by multiple attackers.
High-capacity magazines, regardless of any ban, can be made with very simple tools or mass-produced with 3-D printers. Another way around the ban would be to use multiple guns, which killers in terror attacks often do.
None of these bans would hinder a determined terrorist. The eight who attacked various sites in Paris in November 2015 were armed with automatic AK-47s and explosive suicide belts. The February 2015 Copenhagen attack was carried out with an automatic M95 assault rifle. In the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris, the terrorists were armed with automatic Kalashnikov rifles, a loaded M42 rocket launcher, semiautomatic handguns, smoke grenades, Molotov cocktails, a hand grenade and sticks of dynamite. All the weapons used in these attacks were already illegal.
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