Germany initiates gun registry, to barely a peep

BERLIN — Imagine a vast registry that details every legal gun owner in the country, along with information about all of their firearms.

Now imagine the gun lobby not making a fuss about it.

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That’s what has happened in Germany, where a new gun database went into service at the beginning of the year.

Until recently, some records were kept on index cards across what used to be 551 separate local registries. Now, law enforcement officials can sit down at their computers and scroll through lists of owners and their guns in seconds.

Hunting is popular in Germany, and gun manufacturers are plentiful and powerful. But the push toward increased regulation and oversight, spurred by a string of school shootings in recent years, has come with little opposition from gun groups. Many gun advocates say that if cars can be registered and regulated, so can weapons.

The tone is far different from that in Washington, where the Newtown, Conn., shootings have prompted President Obama to unveil proposals to ban assault weapons and tighten background checks.

There, opponents in Congress — including some Democrats — have expressed skepticism about sweeping new regulations. The National Rifle Association, meanwhile, has proposed increasing the number of weapons at schools, a measure that would be unlikely to draw much support in Germany.

“The German minister of interior promised to guarantee a very high level of security of the data, so for us it’s not a problem,” said Frank Goepper, the general manager of Forum Waffenrecht, one of Germany’s main gun rights groups.

“We are used to it,” Goepper said of German regulations, which are significantly stricter than in the United States. “We are able to go hunting with it. We are able to do our sports with it. So it works.”

Now, German law enforcement agencies know that there are 5.5 million legally registered guns in their country of 80 million people. Law enforcement officials say the gun database will help them quickly trace ownership if they find a legally registered gun connected to a crime. If they are preparing a raid on a house, they can scout the address in the database to be better prepared for what weapons might lie within. Before the database, they could only guess at overall numbers, and finding the weapons registered to a certain address had been laborious.

“When a weapon was involved in a crime, there really weren’t any instruments to be able to track it down,” said Joachim Sturm, the head of the Interior Ministry’s weapons department, who led the project to develop the register. “We had a year-long discussion about its contents.”

Sturm says his ambition is to expand the database so that it tracked guns from the moment they were manufactured, not just when they are sold. That might also help officials keep better tabs on illegal weapons, which many groups estimate as far outnumbering legal ones, at upward of 20 million. (Sturm claims the actual number is far lower.) Even if illegal weapons turn up, Sturm hopes to have an easier time tracking its origins.