Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Gun laws, we’re told, keep bad people from getting guns. That’s why Europe supposedly has a crime rate far lower than what we have here in the United States. We’re told that failures of gun control here in the United States are the result of failures of pro-gun regions and not because of anything else.
However, a recent arrest in Athens, Greece provides another data point that bad guys will get guns no matter what.
Two suspected urban guerrillas allegedly linked to planned attacks on foreign embassies in Athens have been remanded in custody after a high profile anti-terror operation in the Greek capital.
The two men, both in their 40s, were jailed after appearing before a public magistrate charged with membership of the terror group, Revolutionary Self Defense, which has claimed credit for assaults on both the French and Mexican embassies. Under Greek law they can be detained for up to 18 months pending trial.
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The armoury, found in the home of another male suspect who has yet to be arrested, included grenades, five Kalashnikov assault rifles, a submachine gun, detonators, pistols, dynamite and TNT.
“What is frightening is the amount of explosives they possessed,” Hardalias told reporters following raids on 13 homes. Forensic research proved that one of the assault rifles had been used in a robbery on a betting shop in Athens’s northern suburb of Cholargos last month, he said. Police had finally been led to the group via DNA blood samples after one of the suspects accidentally shot himself in the leg during the raid on the shop.
The prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, called the operation a “very big success” pledging his four-month-old centre right government would crack down on militant groups that pose a danger to public security.
That’s not a lot of firepower in the United States, absent the explosives, but in Europe? That’s a whole other ballgame.
Greece has some very strict gun control laws, regulations that might be extreme for even California, yet what do we see here? Bad guys getting guns? Shocking, I know.
On Tuesday, I wrote about how guns are kind of like water. They’ll find their way through the path of least resistance and they’ll find the “low spots,” in this case those who want guns regardless of the law. In this case, a group of guys accumulated five AK-pattern rifles, a submachine gun, and explosives.
Let’s also acknowledge that there wasn’t some pro-gun country just across the border. There was no European version of Indiana that allowed guns to flow into Greece’s Chicago. No, Greece is surrounded by other anti-gun countries. The whole of Europe is anti-gun. There’s no pro-gun path for illegal firearms to flow into the country from…except for criminal sources.
In this case, that’s the path of least resistance, and that’s what these men allegedly took.
Look, it’s time to stop pretending that gun laws actually work. We can find failure after failure that shows bad guys getting guns while good guys remain disarmed. Not just here, but everywhere.
Keep in mind these terrorists got guns in Athens, Greece, not Athens, Georgia. If gun laws worked, that wouldn’t be the case.
Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/