Posts Tagged Europe

Czech Republic Moves To Expand Gun Rights

From NRA-ILA:

Exactly two weeks after the Czech Republic announced that they would challenge restrictive changes to the European Union’s European Firearms Directive in the European Court of Justice, the small nation has once again acted to defend themselves against transnational gun controllers. On June 28, the Czech Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Czech Parliament) approved a constitutional amendment to protect Czech citizens’ right to possess firearms and ammunition, with a reported 139 of 200 deputies voting in favor.

Specifically, the proposed constitutional amendment ensures that Czech citizens have a right to keep and bear arms in order to participate in preserving national security.

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British Citizens Demand Their Gun Rights

From Tribunist:

As reported by Vocativ, Dave Ewing, a representative from Firearms-UK, a gun ownership advocacy group, said, “These tragedies may have been the eye opener to just how ineffective our laws are.”

Advocacy groups including Firearms-UK, Arm UK Citizens, England Wants Its Guns Back, and Legalise Guns in the UK, have taken to social media to make their perspectives heard regarding the strict legislation surrounding gun ownership in the UK and accusing the government of leaving citizens exposed to threats though the restrictions.

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The English Want Their Guns Back

Carry Now is an advocacy group in Europe and is growing in Britain in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

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Translator: Syrian Immigrants To Europe Preaching Hatred

From The Daily Mail:

The Arabic speaker worked in a number of asylum centres across the country and went undercover to discover migrants were preaching ‘pure hatred’ about non-Muslims and women were planning to have more children to ‘destroy Christians’.

She said the hostility is also visible at asylum homes, where Muslim children refuse to play with Christians.

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EU Tries To Mess With Swiss Gun Laws

From Guns.com:

Switzerland and the European Union are at odds over efforts by the EU to curb the neutral country’s treasured gun culture and citizen-soldier tradition.

While not an EU-member, Switzerland has entered into a series of treaties over the years to adopt various laws in conjunction with the organization in order to trade freely with in the European Single Market. At the same time, the Alpine country, which has been more or less neutral since splitting from the Holy Roman Empire in 1499, has maintained a tradition of national service in their military while keeping some of the loosest gun laws in Europe if not the world.

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Study: Islamists Come From All Walks Of Life, Not Just Loners

From Maclean’s:

A new study based on interviews conducted over social media with foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria raises doubts about the commonly held notion that young men in North America and Europe who are drawn to violent Islamic extremism must be marginalized loners looking for an alternative to their dead-end lives.

Three university researchers who contacted dozens of jihadists from abroad in Iraq and Syria, including some Canadians, say they seemed to be drawn mainly by the religious ideas—“no matter how ill-informed or unorthodox”—behind jihadism. Rather than being isolated individuals who self-radicalized in front of their computer screens, the report says they usually found mentors and, at least in the case of the Canadians, joined the fighting in “clusters.”

In the working paper, they write that the foreign fighters they contacted “run the gamut from troubled youth with personal problems to accomplished young men and women from stable backgrounds.” In the 20 interviews they analyzed, not one of their subjects suggested “directly or indirectly” that being marginalized socially or economically pushed them onto such an extreme path.

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Terrorists Will Find Their Way Here Warns FBI

From Bloomberg:

Hundreds of terrorists will fan out to infiltrate western Europe and the U.S. to carry out attacks on a wider scale as Islamic State is defeated in Syria, FBI Director James Comey warned.

“At some point there’s going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we’ve never seen before,” Comey said Wednesday in New York. “We saw the future of this threat in Brussels and Paris,” said the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, adding that future attacks will be on “an order of magnitude greater.”

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French No Longer Publishing Names of Terrorists

From American Renaissance:

“The sites and newspapers that produce this information cannot excuse themselves from self-examination on several fronts. Since Isis terrorism first appeared, Le Monde has changed its practices several times,” the newspaper said.

It first chose not to republish images from Isis propaganda documents. Then, after the attack in Nice on 14 July, when a truck drove through crowds enjoying the Bastille Daypublic holiday, Le Monde said it had decided to “no longer publish photographs of the perpetrators of killings, to avoid the potential effect of posthumous glorification”.

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UK Cops Fear Prosecution If They Carry And Use Firearms

From GOP USA:

Police chiefs are struggling to recruit enough officers willing to carry a gun to tackle a Paris-style terror attack, because they fear they will be treated as criminal suspects if they use their weapon in the line of duty, the country’s top firearms officer has warned.

After November’s terrorist gun and bomb attacks on Paris, senior security officials believe Britain needs an extra 1,500 armed officers. But because half won’t make it through rigorous training and selection, police chiefs need 3,000 volunteers to come forward.

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Threat Analysis Of Possible Future Russian Aggression

From CNAS.org:

In the report, CNAS senior fellows Julianne Smith and Jerry Hendrix examine possible security challenges in effort to prepare the United States and Europe for future existential threats posed by Russia. Smith and Hendrix note that although Europe’s security situation was largely considered stable for much of the last 10 to 14 years, that premise no longer holds true.

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The European Union Is Not a Security Union

The European Union Is Not a Security Union is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

Summary

In the wake of any shocking event, national governments and officials of the European Union invariably call for more cooperation between member states to prevent anything similar happening in the future. The response to the March 22 terrorist attacks in Brussels has been no different.

Following the attacks, the governments of Germany, Italy, France and members of the European Commission demanded a global response to the terrorist threat. The commission’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker, even proposed the creation of a “security union” to combat terrorism at the continental level. In a March 24 meeting, ministers at the EU Justice and Home Affairs Council highlighted the need to share information among member states to fight terrorism. But despite the calls for greater cooperation among EU members, the national interests of individual member states will prevail in the long run, limiting the possibility of integration within the bloc on security issues. Read the rest of this entry »

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Brussels Attacks Tear at the Fabric of the European Union

Brussels Attacks Tear at the Fabric of the European Union is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

Analysis

The March 22 terrorist attacks in Brussels come as the European Union is still reeling from the November Paris attacks and scrambling to solve the migrant crisis. More important, they come as nationalist forces are challenging key principles of the Continental bloc, including the free movement of labor and the Schengen Agreement, which eliminated border controls among several member states. The atmosphere of fear and suspicion that is sure to follow will only worsen these social, political and economic crises.

The first outcome of the Brussels attacks will be a fresh round of debate over EU border controls, in particular those in the Schengen zone. The Schengen Agreement came under fire at the start of the migrant crisis in early 2015. The Paris attacks escalated the controversy, particularly because the perpetrators moved between France and Belgium without detection. Consequently, France and other countries enhanced their border controls. The European Commission has since said that it wants all border controls in the Schengen area lifted by the end of 2016. However, the latest attacks — and the potential that more will follow — will make this difficult. Read the rest of this entry »

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After Paris Attack, Band Frontman Says Gun Control Didn’t Save A Single Life

From Newsweek:

In a tearful interview to French TV channel iTélé, the 43-year-old said: “Did your French gun control stop a single f***ing person from dying at the Bataclan? And if anyone can answer yes, I’d like to hear it, because I don’t think so. I think the only thing that stopped it was some of the bravest men that I’ve ever seen in my life charging headfirst into the face of death with their firearms.

“I know people will disagree with me, but it just seems like God made men and women, and that night guns made them equal,” he added. “And I hate it that it’s that way. I think … that maybe until nobody has guns everybody has to have them.

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Getting to the Root of France’s Muslim Dilemma

Getting to the Root of France’s Muslim Dilemma is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

Analysis

By Joe Parson

The jihadist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo signified the beginning of a new period of insecurity for France. Since those shots rang out a little over a year ago, France has been beset by threats, false alarms and more successful attacks. The latest of these, of course, took place in Paris itself, triggering the first nationwide state of emergency since 1961. Having been away for most of 2015, when I arrived back for the holidays I found the country had somehow changed. Disembarking at Charles Gaulle airport’s oldest terminal, whimsically known as le Camembert for its roundness, I found the same futuristic, grimy moving walkways and familiar odor of the Paris metro. Much was the same, but then I noticed that the usual airport security was gone, replaced by military personnel patrolling with automatic rifles.

France’s security alert system, Plan Vigipirate, was developed in the late 1970s, updated once in the mid-1990s and twice more in the early 2000s. It reached its highest level of alert (scarlet) after the March 2012 Toulouse and Montauban attacks. In January 2015, however, authorities created a new, higher level to reflect the perceived current danger. As I traveled through Paris and the rest of the country I saw these security measures in action on the city’s metro and on the country’s high-speed train, the Train à Grande Vitesse. Security checks have become much more common, and this has led to some delays. False alarms triggered by such things as suspicious packets of cookies on a Nantes tram or forgotten luggage have stopped trains across the country. Over the New Year holiday, the center of Paris was cordoned off and people were individually screened before being allowed to continue on foot. Even the Christmas market in Strasbourg, far from Paris, was blocked off to automobile traffic, and identification checks were mandatory.

French police officers stand guard during a Jan. 1 New Year’s parade along Paris’ Champs-Elysees. (JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images)

Read the rest of this entry »

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In France Refugees Stop Attack When Threatened With A Gun

From The Daily Wire:

A video making the rounds purports to show a group of French citizens confronted by what seems to be north African Muslim immigrants of male working-age armed with rocks, knives, and bats.

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