Mass slaying puts spotlight on French gun laws
by Mark John
Reuters UK
28 March 2002
France's gun laws came under scrutiny on Thursday after it emerged they may not have been correctly applied to the gunman who shot dead eight local councillors in one of France's worst massacres of recent times.
Anxious to deflect blame ahead of next month's presidential election, the Socialist-led government insisted any loopholes would be closed by a law passed after the September 11 U.S. attacks, which gave authorities greater scope for control.
"It will give local prefects greater capacity to confiscate guns from those considered dangerous to others or themselves," Interior Minister Daniel Vaillant told France 2 television of the law, which still needs final approval from the Council of State.
With crime the top campaign issue before the April 21 and May 5 two-round vote, Vaillant also promised greater efforts to track down the large number of illegal weapons that have entered France from the Balkans in the past decade.
France's main gun sports association insisted no further tightening was necessary and pointed to the failure of tougher laws in other countries -- notably in Britain after the 1996 Dunblane massacre -- to combat handgun crime.
Although violent crime has been on the rise in France in recent years, attackers are more likely to use knives, baseball bats or other blunt instruments instead of guns.
Richard Durn, a 33-year-old unemployed loner, went on a shooting spree with semi-automatic pistols from the public gallery early on Wednesday after a council session in the northwest Paris suburb of Nanterre.
He committed suicide on Thursday by throwing himself from the Paris police building where he was being interrogated.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
With candidates applying for gun
licences required to provide medical records, authorities were unable to explain
how Durn managed to get a licence in 1997 despite a longstanding record of
psychological problems and treatment as a chronic depressive.
It was also unclear why his local Hauts-de-Seine prefecture did not ask him to give back his guns in 2000, as they are required to do, when he did not renew his licence.
"This is in the hands of investigators now. I cannot comment," a spokesman at the prefecture said on Thursday. Around 100,000 guns are sold legally in France a year, a third of the figure a decade ago since a progressive tightening of gun legislation in 1993 and 1998.
The French Shooting Federation (FFTir) says it has some 140,000 members and hunting groups say France has a further 1.4 million people using weapons subject to lesser controls than the Glock and Smith & Wesson handguns used by Durn. The FFTir insisted on Thursday that Durn's local gun club had reported to the Hauts-de-Seine prefecture that he had not renewed his certificate but had not heard anything back. "There is a complete lack of transparency as far as the prefecture's decisions are concerned. We (the gun clubs) have no way of knowing what they are up to," a spokeswoman said. But she rejected any further tightening of gun laws, arguing that British laws outlawing handguns that were introduced after the 1996 massacre of 16 children by a lone gunman at a school in Dunblane in Scotland had proved ineffectual. "Handgun crime has gone up there and there are more (illegal) guns then ever," she said, echoing domestic British criticism that the British government has failed to address use of unlicensed arms by criminal gangs.
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