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PARIS If you’re not a hunter or a target shooter, it really is almost impossible to purchase a gun legally in France. But the country’s strict gun manage laws are not adequate to hold deadly weapons out of the hands of Islamist militants.

    Gaps in the current laws, light sentences, and the absence of a European agency like the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), with its billion-dollar spending budget and thousands of agents, are the principal difficulties facing France and its neighbors as they focus on tackling gun trafficking in the wake of the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, experts said.

    The coordinated attacks, which killed 130 folks, had a cross-border dimension. Two of the suicide bombers lived in Belgium and German police arrested a man who, according to a newspaper, may possibly have sold the militants their guns.

    “We want a European ATF,” said Jean-Charles Antoine, a researcher at the French Institute of Geopolitics and author of two books on arms trafficking. “Gun trafficking constantly turns on the want for guns. And proper now terrorists require guns.”

    France already has some of the strictest gun laws in the planet. Automatic weapons are banned, although a lot of other guns need government authorization and a medical exam, along with a permit from a hunting or sport shooting federation.

    The public is usually supportive of the laws, although their attitudes having changed significantly more than the decades, stated Paris lawyer Laurent-Franck Lienard. “Thirty years ago, France was a nation exactly where everyone had guns and it was deemed regular,” he stated.

    The difficulty with hard laws, Lienard stated, is that “they only apply to these who comply with them.” Illegal weapons are another matter. Lienard said that Balkan gangsters utilized to manage the flow of guns in France in the 1990s. These days, there is a large trade in the theft of legally-held guns.

    There are an estimated 15 million legal and illegal guns circulating in France, according to Antoine of the French Institute of Geopolitics. Of those he said up to 15,000 may possibly be “weapons of war.”

    But with relatively few gun crimes compared to nations like the United States, European authorities have paid gun trafficking scant consideration. “For the last 20 years we have worked mainly on drugs,” Antoine said.

    In a striking coincidence, France’s answer to the problem came on the very day of the Nov. 13 attacks. That morning, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced a national plan to counter illegal guns, citing worsening gang violence and terrorism. “Terrorists are far more effortlessly acquiring the guns they require to carry out their planned attacks,” he mentioned.

    The strategy will incorporate a database to map trafficking networks, modeled after one particular used for drugs, and a unit to collect intelligence on Balkan-French gun pipelines. It would also give police a lot more powers to work undercover and track sellers or buyers on the Internet, he mentioned at the time.

    It is unclear whether additional measures are getting studied in the wake of the attacks. Spokespeople for France’s Interior Ministry and the National Police declined to comment for this post.

    INTELLIGENCE

    Researchers say the challenge with gun-trafficking is gathering intelligence on networks just before any attacks.

    Nils Duquet, an arms researcher for the Flemish Parliament in Brussels, said legislators may possibly have to rethink the mandate of Europol, a police agency primarily based in The Hague that supports information exchange amongst national police forces. Europol presently does not have the mandate to carry out investigations itself.

    “Do we want that, or some sort of European police force set up to deal with transnational troubles, such as arms trafficking and terrorism?” he asked.

    In the U.S., the ATF helps execute this role, enforcing gun laws and targeting illegal trafficking. Developed in 1972, the agency investigated more than 23,000 firearms situations and performed 360,000 traces final year.

    The agency has almost 2,500 unique agents and a spending budget of $ 1.two billion, a far cry from the resources accessible in Europe, Antoine mentioned.

    France has a section of police officers within its organized crime unit assigned to trafficking, as do other European nations, but their numbers are comparatively few, he said.

    In the speech announcing the plan, Cazeneuve mentioned he would improve maximum penalties for possessing the deadliest guns, from three to five years. Lienard, the Paris lawyer, stated judges in France hardly ever give jail terms longer than a single or two years.

    “They ought to be acquiring 30 years. They’re promoting death!” he said.

    Deactivated guns could also pose a threat. There are gaps in the law that allow these guns from nations such as Slovakia, which has lax rules on decommissioning, to be sold in France, Antoine stated. These weapons can be effortlessly reconverted into live fire weapons – a situation that played out during attacks in Paris final January.

    On Nov. 18, the European Commission accelerated proposals to tighten gun laws on the continent, and announced harmonized policies for deactivating guns, to take effect in 3 months.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung. Extra reporting by Chine Labbé editing by Janet McBride)

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