Dressler, Matteo, Nils Duquet & Julia Eckelmann. 2021 ‘Scope of Non-regularised Firearms in EU Member States. Germany.’ Forgotten Weapons? Non-regularised firearms in the European Union, p. 31. Brussels: Flemish Peace Institute. 28 April

Relevant contents

In… Germany, a combination of historical sources of non-regularisation has resulted in many illicitly possessed firearms.

First, the largest part of illegal possession in Germany is most likely due to a significant revision of the legal firearms framework in 1972-1976. Law enforcement experts assume that many citizens did not regularize their weapons during the subsequent legalization campaign. This legislative change was preceded by years of very few restrictions on buying firearms.

Second, many German guns were either kept, hidden or left behind during the Second World War. As reported in previous sections, this most likely entails that a sizeable quantity of firearms is still in possession of civilians who have inherited firearms from their relatives without trying to regularise them. The exact scope of this phenomenon is unknown.

A sizeable online survey on German citizens' relationship with money provides an estimate of how significant the overall share of people is who expect to inherit a weapon. The survey found that 2% of all respondents expected to inherit a weapon (not necessarily a firearm) and that two out of three of those respondents intended to keep and not sell the weapon. The survey does not distinguish between the legal (or illegal) status of the weapons respondents expect to inherit.

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