EU Parliament revised gun law, will affect Swiss citizens

Controls on firearms in the European Union would be tightened under legislation approved by the European Parliament on Tuesday. The new rules would require member states to check whether deactivated weapons have been rendered permanently unusable. Such weapons are used legally on film sets or in theatre productions. The deactivated weapons must also be registered. 

The directive also applies stricter controls to firearms designed to fire blanks. The European Commission had proposed to reform the firearms directive in November 2015 in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris.

Amedy Coulibaly, who attacked a kosher supermarket in early 2015, had been carrying two Ceska Sa vz.58 automatic rifles fabricated in the 1960s. The guns had been decommissioned and legally bought in Slovakia, but were then reconverted to fire live ammunition.

The new rules also toughen regulations on semi-automatic weapons with larger magazines. Member states will have 15 months from the date of entry into force of the directive to transpose the new rules into national law and 30 months to put in place data-filling systems for registering all information needed in order to trace and identify firearms.

A recent report from the EU police agency, Europol, said traffickers are still exploiting legal loopholes and different rules between member states. Only earlier this year in January, counter-terrorism units from the Spanish National Police seized 10,000 firearms from a criminal gang, which was using a sports shop as a front also to sell deactivated firearms.

The commission plan was to close the loophole that allowed people to purchase non-firing guns that they could then later convert into a live weapon. Nobody knows how many are in circulation but almost 70 percent of the guns recovered by German police in 2013 had been converted replicas.

Some members of the legislature feared that the interests of hunters and shooting sports enthusiasts have not been adequately taken into consideration. 

The new rules should also apply to Switzerland as a member country of the Schengen Area. Last year the Swiss Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga said that "the EU will not ban the assault rifle in Switzerland" and that citizens will continue to keep him home at the end of the military service.

However, according to Catherine Maret Federal Office of Police (FedPol), quoted today by the "Blick" online, with today's decision of the European Parliament in the future there will still be some "restrictions", such as the limitation to ten cartridges per magazine or compelled to belong to an association. In addition, Switzerland will have to establish a new gun registry.

Spokeswoman Fedpol added that the Strasbourg decisions should be endorsed by the Ministers of Justice of the Schengen area within two weeks. Switzerland would later adopt "with the parliamentary approval reserve". Subsequently, the Federal Council will have to expose to the Chamber how the new guidelines should be implemented in Swiss law.