Our Background
FIREARMS UNITED was founded by Dariusz Dura, Andrzej Turczyn, Rafał Pęcherzewski from Poland and Janusz Michalik, Katja Triebel from Germany in October 2013 when Cecilia Malmström, former Commissioner of the DG HOME – Section for Interiors in the European Commission (COM) – presented her “Action Plan on (against) Firearms”.
FIREARMS UNITED brings together more than 100 million law-abiding gun owners in Europe. These include reservists, hunters, sport shooters, collectors, firearm dealers, manufacturers, security professionals, range operators and ordinary citizens who own firearms legally.
Our Petition
FIREARMS UNITED started the petition “EU : You cannot stop terrorism by restricting legal gun ownership” which got 342,276 signatures from concerned gun owners in Europe.
On the morning of 7th January 2015 Terrorists attacked Charlie Hebdo, with fully automatic, unregistered and illegal firearms.
Since then the EU has been preparing new legislation to ban semi-automatic firearms in the hands of law abiding EU citizens. Despite the fact that these weapons were not used by terrorists and are not even typically used by criminals. The draft can be read here: European Commission strengthens control of firearms across the EU.
They use unregistered, untraceable black market full auto Kalashnikovs.
The new legislation has been on the back burner since April 2015, only to surface now on 18th of November, barely 5 days after a second attack in Paris.
The victims of this tragedy have not been buried yet, the criminals are still on the loose and the police has not even finished the investigation and yet the EU is announcing measures to prevent something like that from happening again.
Unfortunately nothing in the draft would have prevented these 2 attacks since neither were done with weapons that are now legal and would be banned with this new law. Nothing.
It is not logical and above all it is extremely unfair.
It is unfair to the victims, it is unfair to the law abiding citizens whose hobby and property will be taken away.
That is the current situation and this new legislation does NOTHING to address those problems.
The 18 November IP-15-6110 draft to amend 91/477/EEC is not only populistic in nature, it is also an insult to our civil liberties and to the intelligence of the EU citizens as a whole.
Our Reports
- Firearms Report I: The European Gun Debate
- Firearms Report II : Gun Ownership in Europe
- Firearms Report III: History of EC’s Action Plan on Firearms
- Firearms Report IV: Report Homicide and Suicide
- Legislative Procedure in EU explained
available in four languages - Firearms Report V: Impact Assessment (short summary)
Firearms United Partners
FIREARMS UNITED was able to get partners worldwide. As some of our partners are from South America, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Moldovia, Switzerland, Philippines and India we expanded our goal from European gun owners to worldwide gun owners.
FIREARMS UNITED was also able to found national chapters in countries where the “old” associations did not accept partnerships, e.g. in Finland, Sweden, Belgium, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Croatia and the US.
FIREARMS UNITED is very proud to have active partners in EU Member States as in Poland, Germany, UK, Austria, Spain, Romania, Czech Republic, Greece, France, Slovakia, Latvia and Italy who openly fight against the proposal of the European Commission.