Monday, October 26, 2015

I think Germany has a lot of people who haven't been asleep,

and more waking up.  I can't get the google translation of the whole piece to come up, but note this that Insty has:
 >There are now 900,000 (legal) weapons in Austrian households, out of a population to 6 – 7 Million
 
>In the state of Upper Austria, all shotguns have been sold out
 
>Women are the fasted growing group buying weapons
Also, the refugee crisis is quoted as a direct cause of the rush to buy guns.
Note that key word: legal.  "Those are the guns people own that we know about.  Which brings up the question "How many REALLY out there?"  Which brings me to this article from a while back:
Well, says the Small Arms Survey, a research outfit established by the Swiss government, the United Kingdom, with just shy of 1.8 million legal firearms, has about four million illegal guns. Belgium, with about 458,000 legal firearms, has roughly two million illegal guns. In Germany, the number is 7.2 million legal guns and between 17 and 20 million off-the-books examples of things that go “bang” (a figure with which the German Police Union very publicly agrees). France, says the Survey, has 15-17 million unlawful firearms in a nation where 2.8 million weapons are held in compliance with the law.
Let's say the ratio is similar in Austria to Germany: rough factor of 2.5 means ~ 2,250,000 firearms; some owned by criminals, the rest by private citizens who never liked the idea of either being unarmed, or of the .gov knowing what all they own.

Things go really bad over there, it's going to surprise the hell out of a lot of people just how many have some arm to grab.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What will be interesting, in the Chinese sense [I can say that being Chinese], will be the three-sided aspect of the war WHEN [not if] it comes. There will be the invaders, presumably with some level of weaponry [the train terrorist stopped by the 3 Americans had an AK-47, a lot of ammo, and a semi-auto pistol in supposedly gun controlled Europe]. There will be the people who will have both legal registered and unregistered firearms. And there will be the civil and military forces of the government, very well armed. I more than suspect that they will be ordered to a) protect the invaders from the racist, Islamophobic native citizens and b) to grab up all of those registered guns they can find.

This is going to be a nasty cluster copulation of the first order, and there is no indication that the people are going to necessarily win.

Subotai Bahadur