Predictably, the Czech Republic is not alone in its fight against the EU “Gun Ban”: Poland is joining its forces. Last March 14th the European Parliament in Strasbourg voted in favor of changing the European Directive 477 from 1991 (EU firearms directive) introducing new restrictions for legal firearms owners.
The EU governments of the member states have 15 months to adapt their own firearms laws to the new EU directive. But the Czech Republic had opposed a tightening of the EU Firearms Directive from the outset and filed a lawsuit against the EU directive restricting firearms possession at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg, demanding an invalidation of the directive. According the Czech Minister of the Interior, the EU has exceeded its competences with the new regulations.
Poland: new EU restrictions are "redundant" and "not always rational"
The Polish Ministry of Interior and Administration has just made public a document dated October 6th announcing that they initiated the procedure to address ”the Court of Justice for admission of Poland to participate in the proceedings for interim relief in the form of a suspension of the contested directive until judgment”. The next step that the Minister of Interior and Administration intends to take – the document reads – “is joining the main complaint for annulment of Directive 2017/853 of May17, 2017”.
The reason is, the Polish government claims, that “the implementation of Directive 2017/853 into Polish law will have serious socio-economic implications for entrepreneurs operating in the field of firearms production and trade, for the firearms owners falling within the scope of this Directive, as well as a significant increase of duties for the administration”. The Polish government also plainly states that the proposed restrictions are "redundant" and "not always rational" since based on "wrong assumptions and lacking the proper factual and bona fide justification" showing that there is a significant dependency between legal market or legal possession and illegal market or criminal activities.
Will other European countries join Poland and the Czech Republic? We hope so. All in all, it seems that the new absurd and useless EU anti-gun crusade won’t be a picnic as some probably expected.
Click here to read about the opposition of the Czech Republic to the EU Firearms Directive on all4shooters.com
15.11.2017
