Situation update:

As we have indicated earlier the European Parliament will vote on the firearms directive on 14th of March.

Firearms United staff has worked overtime to provide you with the summary of the current situation:

The voting will work with the following principle if it follows the standard protocol: First there is a majority vote on whether the current compromise (with all the magazine restrictions etc) is approved or not, and if not, then the voting will proceed with the proposed amendments, which there are 166 (!!!)

You can find all the amendments from here:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/plenary/en/report-details.html?reference=A8-0251-2016

Those with a patience of a Buddha can go through and read them one by one, but we have also summarized them briefly for those of us with little time and short attention span:
001-108 are inherited from IMCO and the new amendments tabled since then are as follows:

ENF:109:

Scrap the whole directive.
This is proposed by Mylène Troszczynski, Matteo Salvini, Marcus Pretzell, Harald Vilimsky and Auke Zijlstra.

Firearms United stuff finds this hard to disagree with.

EFDD: 110, 121, 122, 123-129, 130-135, 136:

Scrap the whole directive (Again – we find this hard to disagree with), markings, collectors position, removal of restrictions to semiautomatic firearms, no international database of firearms owners, the commission should consult hobbyists and stakeholders before implementing anything, no confiscation of anything, foreign officials should not have direct access to read information of firearms owners information, all previously automatic firearms should not be banned, if the conversion has been done properly, the magazine restriction in current compromise is 10, which is proposed to be increased to 20 rounds, properly deactivated firearms should not be treated as firearms, Swiss exception is not cool because it puts different countries to unequal position and therefore it should apply to all EU countries as well. If anything is confiscated, it should be properly compensated.

ALDE: 113-120:

Commission should draw a specification on what is acceptable way to permanently convert firearm to semiautomatic (instead of blanket banning all of them).

Note: Firearms United is concerned about this because knowing the quality of original firearms directive which clearly demonstrated commissions firearms knowledge we are not holding our breath for a properly functional proposal.

Filed by MEPs from different groups: 137-145; 148-164:

Better definition of criteria for category A firearms. If permits are canceled in one MS, this knowledge should be available to authorities. Magazine restrictions should be increased from 10 to 32 rounds with long firearms, deactivation principles are clarified, and sport shooter exception is modified to more functional direction. Grand fathering should apply to magazines as well, drop in auto-sears and full-auto-parts should be banned to category A, psychological evaluation (or lack there of) should be left for individual member state to decide.

Picture: Oleg Volk

#EUGunban