Gun amnesty a 'success'

A gun amnesty triggered a wave of submissions with 7,897 weapons being surrendered in what police described as "without doubt, a success."

While the Czech Republic is not noted for gun crime, police say there are 650,000 registered gun owners in the country, including more than 200,000 who have the right to carry a concealed weapon and possibly hundreds of thousands who possess weapons illegally. Weapons surrendered during the amnesty, which ran from February to July, accounted for a small fraction of illegally held guns.

"The number of weapons returned was a display of trust in the amnesty and the police," said Milan Komárek, head of Service for Weapons and Security Material.

But he admits is difficult to estimate the number of illegally held weapons.

"I truly can't tell if the estimates [of illegally held weapons] are around hundreds of thousands or millions; it's hard to say," Komárek said.

"If you look at the arms amnesty, you can see there were thousands of guns circling around, and the question is how many of them remain."

About 3,000 weapons in total were handed in during the previous two amnesties, in 1996 and 2003, less than half the total for this amnesty.

"If you look at the past two amnesties and the number of guns returned, and then add them up, you get more in this year's number. So, without a doubt, it's a success," Komárek said.

"It's not so much about the number [of guns] but more about the fact that people got used to the amnesty and also the approach of the police, who did not ask them what kind of gun it was, where they got it or who offered them the gun."

Gun laws in the Czech Republic are surprisingly liberal. Unlike most European countries, where permits to carry a concealed weapon are only issued to individuals who demonstrate a specific reason, anyone who can prove to the police that they need a weapon for the purpose of self-defense is entitled to carry a gun in public.

"The number of licensed holders in this category is 234,244,"  police spokeswoman Dagmar Bednarčíková said.

People who surrendered guns were entitled to get them back, this time with a legal license, after police ran a check on the weapon to ensure it had not been used in a crime.

"As long as we don't find that the gun belongs to someone else or that it was used in a crime or misdemeanor, then, yes, that person can take steps to legalize their ownership of the weapon," police spokeswoman Veronika Benediktová told Czech Television.

The weapon can also be returned without a license, provided it was decommissioned first. Many of the weapons handed in dated from World War II or the immediate decades after and may have been decorative pieces that hung on walls or above fireplaces.

As well as prohibited, unlicensed and unwanted firearms, the police also encouraged people to hand in air guns and imitation guns if they want to get rid of them.

Tom Clifford can be reached at
tclifford@praguepost.com