GUUUUUUUUNZ

[LesPalenik]

I also agree with Robert, specifically with his last three paragraphs. Not with his opening salvo.

According to my sources, as of December 31, 2018, over 600,000 German citizens owned firearms licenses, including over 50,000 new licenses just in 2018.
So the annual addition in firearm licenses is not 10 nor 30, and also not in excess of 100,000. Let's assume that in the recent years the annual number of new gun licences was around 50,000. Considering this volume, the relative comparison stating a triple increase after the 2015 New Year event is perfectly reasonable. The 53,000 new licences in 2018 constitute only 9% increase, but that is based on an already significantly increased base. It would be even more telling to see a graph showing absolute numbers between 2012 and 2018, but I don't have access to those statistics.

As of December 31, 2018, 610,931 German people were issued firearms licenses. The figures equated to a huge increase of over 50,000 more licenses in 2018.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6598027/Germany-sees-huge-rise-number-weapon-license-applications.html

Another fact not obvious from the stats above, and also not widely publicized is that precisely because of the strict gun laws, more bad guys and also more law-abiding Germans resort to knives. That was also documented in my aforementioned youtube link where the young girl showed the reporter her pocket knife. This is in no means an isolated case, I personally knew a retired German engineer, a rather stately fellow, who over the years amassed a good collection of various knives for self-defense, and carried one even on his bike trips, so the number of knives carried everyday by people in Germany could be rather high.

German media do not report most knife-related violence. Crimes that are reported are often dismissed as "isolated incidents" that are unrelated to mass immigration. Moreover, many crime reports, including those in police blotters, omit references to the nationalities of the perpetrators and victims — apparently to avoid inflaming anti-immigration sentiments.... Many Germans have the sense that danger lurks everywhere, but the lack of official statistics seemingly allows German authorities to pretend that the problem is imaginary. Police reported more than 4,100 knife-related crimes in 2018, compared to around 3,800 reported during 2017 — and only 400 in 2008. Overall, during the past ten years, knife-related crimes in Germany have increased by more than 900% — from one a day to more than ten a day.

Germany's knife-crime epidemic has continued nonstop into 2019. During the first 45 days of 2019, police reported more than 500 knife crimes — an average of 11 a day.

Mourtala Madou, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from Niger, has been sentenced to life in prison for stabbing to death his 34-year-old German ex-girlfriend and decapitating their 21-month-old daughter at a subway station in Hamburg. The grisly crime has drawn renewed attention to Germany's spiraling epidemic of stabbings and knife violence, which has raged since Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed into the country more than a million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The double murder in Hamburg occurred the morning of April 12, 2018, one day after a family judge denied Madou (also known as Mado Bido M. or Mourtala M.) joint custody of his daughter. Madou followed the mother, Sandra P., and their toddler, Mariam, into the Jungfernstieg station in downtown Hamburg. In front of many passers-by, he opened his backpack, pulled out a knife and stabbed his stroller-bound daughter in the abdomen. He then slashed her neck and severed her head. Madou subsequently plunged the knife into Sandra P.'s back and cut through her vital organs. She died less than an hour later at a nearby hospital.

During interrogation by police, Madou explained: "This is my child. This is my blood. The mother separates me from the child. Then I separate the child from her."

On February 15, 2019, the Hamburg District Court (Landgericht Hamburg) sentenced Madou to life in prison for two counts of murder. In addition, the court established a "particular severity of guilt" (besondere Schwere der Schuld), a legal mechanism applied to sentences for especially brutal crimes. That verdict disqualifies Madou from automatically being eligible for parole after serving 15 years, as otherwise is the normal practice in Germany. A lawyer representing Sandra P.'s sister said that the sentence handed to Madou was "the maximum we could legally achieve."

Police and prosecutors had initially tried to conceal from the public that Madou had decapitated the baby, but a commuter — Ghanaian citizen Daniel J., a gospel singer at an evangelical church in Hamburg — who happened to arrive at the subway station moments after the attack filmed the scene on his phone.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13802/germany-stabbings-knife-crimes


I happen to agree also with Robert's second paragraph. The camera zoom ratio is completely meaningless to me (especially in 10-30mm range), and usually I carry two cameras - one with a prime wide angle or 24-85mm lens and the other with a 70-200mm lens.

[MMitchell]

Actually, it matters a great deal.

For many years, there was an extended debate among legal scholars, echoed in a number of appellate cases, about whether the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1791, referred to a private right to possess firearms or to a collective right that could only be exercised by a militia—such as the federally-chartered reserve military organizations maintained by the individual states (the "National Guard").  Prior to 2008, I think the weight of legal opinion was that the provision was intended to refer to the latter.

That year, in an appeal captioned District of Coumbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted the opposite interpretation, invalidating a Washington, D.C. local law that effectively prohibited personal possession of firearms, ruling that

In subsequent litigation, the Supreme Court extended to the states the constitutional principle that possession of firearms was a personal rather than a collective right.  (For those reading this from other countries, I should point out that the District of Columbia, as the national capital, is an enclave of the federal government, and therefore Heller did not directly address the authority of the individual states to ban firearms.)

This case law settled the fundamental constitutional issue.  However, both the federal government and the states retain broad discretion—precisely how broad will probably need to be determined by future litigation—to regulate firearms.  What is clear is that neither can pass laws that explicitly or implicitly ban gun possession by individuals.

How much regulation there will be in the future is essentially a political issue which, I suspect, will be determined on a state-by-state basis rather than by the federal government.  The United States is a huge and very diverse country.  Gun control laws and regulations that make sense to the voters in Maryland, where I live, may seem ludicrous to voters in Montana.  And vice versa.

There may be some areas where Congress will pass new legislation for the entire country—for example, to close some loopholes in the federal gun registration requirements or to regulate additional types of rapid-firing weapons and large magazines or accumulations of ammunition.  But getting a national consensus on the proper extent of gun control has proved extremely elusive, and absent a considerable shift in public opinion it appears to me that these decisions will largely be left to the states.

The right of the federal government  (and the Supreme Court *is* federal govt.) to opine on the first two Amendments, given that those are worded as absolute prohibitions against infringement by federal government, is quite dubious. While the Supreme Court's opinion on these Amendments may be considered to have merit, their right to enforce those opinions is clearly prohibited by the very wording of those Amendments.

[amolitor]

The right of the federal government  (and the Supreme Court *is* federal govt.) to opine on the first two Amendments, given that those are worded as absolute prohibitions against infringement by federal government, is quite dubious. While the Supreme Court's opinion on these Amendments may be considered to have merit, their right to enforce those opinions is clearly prohibited by the very wording of those Amendments.

What? This is an absurd position, for several reasons, not least among which you are pretty clearly not certain of the very wording you refer to.

[MMitchell]

What? This is an absurd position, for several reasons, not least among which you are pretty clearly not certain of the very wording you refer to.

'Absurd' is not logical, it's emotional. The several reasons are of course missing. And the very wording is clear: "Congress shall make no law..." and "...shall not be infringed".

"Shall not" and "make no law" are absolutes, not relative.

[amolitor]

Congress is not the Federal Government, and definitely isn't the Supreme Court.

The idea that the Supreme Court is not in a position to opine on the Amendments to the Constitution is ridiculous. It directly contradicts the powers of the Supreme Court as laid out in the Constitution in Article III section 2 paragraph 2, the bit which reads: the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, and frankly sounds like a lunatic theory cribbed from some fringe gun-rights web site. It is ludicrous and wrong.

[MMitchell]

Congress is not the Federal Government, and definitely isn't the Supreme Court.

The idea that the Supreme Court is not in a position to opine on the Amendments to the Constitution is ridiculous. It directly contradicts the powers of the Supreme Court as laid out in the Constitution in Article III section 2 paragraph 2, the bit which reads: the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, and frankly sounds like a lunatic theory cribbed from some fringe gun-rights web site. It is ludicrous and wrong.

Congress and the Supreme Court are two of the 3 branches of the federal government.

Your answer is so full of emotion that it's nearly incoherent. To repeat: The Bill of Rights, particularly in this case the first two Amendments, are clearly from their wording absolutes, and prohibit the government (Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court) from abrogating the rights described therein.

I'd suggest that you've been blinded over many years of relativistic indoctrination to accept that which the founders laid down as unacceptable. There's a very good reason that the people of the U.S. have held these Amendments (rights) as sacrosanct over the centuries, and that reason is obvious to any freedom loving Citizen (as opposed to Subject).

A government of the people puts the people first, as citizens, not subjects. The government's right to administrate and govern is laid out in the Constitution, and the 10th Amendment makes it clear that their powers are limited. I get from your answers that you believe the government to be more of a ruler than an administrator and enforcer of existing law, and that they have carte blanche to seize more power whenever they so decide.

[amolitor]

You have no idea of my politics, to be blunt, and since we seem to be talking past one another, each claiming that the other is holding an insane position, I will simply let it rest there.