After witnessing disarmed French civilians cowering before a few Islamists rampaging through Paris with illegal guns, top officials in the Czech Republic are determined to ensure that similar tragedies do not strike in their own country. Following recent comments by Czech President Miloš Zeman urging citizens to arm themselves in preparation for a potential “super-Holocaust” perpetrated by jihadists flooding into Europe, senior government ministers in the Eastern European nation are now proposing a constitutional change authorizing the use of firearms by citizens against terrorists. However, reports suggest the proposal might also be used as a vehicle to comply with unpopular and illegitimate new European Union decrees attacking gun rights and law-abiding gun owners.
The Czech Republic is already home to nearly a million “registered” guns, and has less infringements on gun rights than most European nations despite maintaining a list of gun owners. The right of citizens to defend themselves and their property using a firearm is already protected, too, with the stipulation being that the self-defense measures must be proportional to the threat. If approved, though, the change to the Czech Constitution would expand the authorization for the use of firearms to cover defense of the state as well, something that is included in many state constitutions in America. That would allow citizens to take action against terrorists in the event of an attack, even if the citizens were not directly threatened.
Citing recent jihad attacks in Europe that have produced hundreds of casualties using illegal guns, bombs, and even trucks, Czech officials say the public is rightly concerned. “The terrorist attacks we have seen in Western Europe and elsewhere have increased security concerns among the public,” said Czech Interior Minister Milan Chovanec, the man behind the proposed constitutional amendment to authorize citizens’ armed defense of the state. “More Czechs are getting firearms licenses and I think that if the situation does not improve in the coming months, then the number of firearms holders will grow.” He is hoping for parliamentary approval of the changes ahead of elections in October.
The Czech Republic, like other Eastern European nations, has stood firm against the ongoing tsunami of Islamic migration swamping Western Europe. In fact, the nation is actually home to only a handful of Muslims: Estimates suggest that less than 5,000 Muslims reside in the nation of 10 million. And like several other like-minded governments, Czech authorities have been vehemently opposed to a plot pushed by the EU super-state to force national governments to accept a quota of Islamic refugees and migrants pouring into Europe from Africa and the Middle East.
However, the nation shares a border with Germany, which admitted millions of Muslim migrants just over the last few years, with more continuing to flood in on a daily basis. The Czech Republic also shares a border with Austria, another nation that has been flooded with Islamic migrants in recent years amid what political leaders said was a “treasonous conspiracy” by globalist “fanatics” to undermine Christianity, Western civilization, and the nation-state. And with internationalists having all but abolished borders across the continent, terrorists can and do easily travel throughout the EU bloc unmolested, making all EU member states vulnerable.
The growing danger led Czech President Zeman — a leftist politician and self-styled former communist — to warn that jihadist terrorists could seek to unleash a “super-Holocaust” against Europeans. “The experience of western European countries which have ghettos and excluded localities shows that the integration of the Muslim community is practically impossible,” he said in a TV interview, arguing that Muslim migrants needed to be sent home.
He has also compared Muslims to Nazi-era Germans — even if many are decent now, they can quickly be radicalized, he argued, drawing fire from critics. “The radicalization of the — until these times — moderate Muslim population might be like the case of the German population,” he argued, saying regular Germans became “Nazis, even fanatic Nazis,” in a period of just a few years. “It might be easier than the German population, [because] you have a very radical ideology based on a religion.”
While a far cry from the United States, where the inalienable right to keep and bear arms is protected from infringement by the U.S. Constitution and is considered necessary to the security of a free state, the Czech Republic has relatively few infringements on gun rights — at least compared to most of its more totalitarian-minded fellow EU member states. Today, a Czech citizen who is of age, without a criminal record, and who can pass a knowledge test can apply for and receive a “shall issue” firearms license. Hundreds of thousands of licenses are already in circulation, and the number is growing quickly.
Of course, those infringements are far more stringent than in most American states, few of which even require a license to exercise the fundamental human right to own a gun. But by European standards, Czech citizens enjoy a great deal of freedom when it comes to firearms. Following strict gun control imposed by mass-murdering National Socialist (Nazi) and Communist regimes, infringements on gun rights were drastically relaxed, to the point where the Czech Republic today has some of the least restrictions on civilian gun ownership in Europe. Having suffered under so much murderous tyranny, citizens largely understand the benefits of gun rights — though apparently the lesson about gun registration abuse has never sunk in. Like in the United States, gun sales in the nation have been soaring.
Speaking in August after a series of Islamist terror attacks rocked Europe, Zeman explained how his views on the subject of gun ownership had shifted over time. “I really think that citizens should arm themselves against terrorists,” he said in an interview, adding that if victims had been armed, they could have fought back. “And I honestly admit that I changed my mind, because previously I was against [citizens] having too many weapons. After these attacks, I don’t think so [anymore].” More terror attacks have happened since then, including one in Berlin last month in which a jihadist mowed over shoppers at a Christmas market.
But authorization for citizens to use firearms against terrorists is only part of the solution, according to Zeman and other Czech leaders. They say the Islamic “invasion” must be stopped and reversed. Zeman especially chastised radical German leader Angela Merkel, herself a “former” communist, for seeking to use the EU to coerce other nations into accepting the millions of Muslim migrants she invited in. “My first sentence in the meeting with Madam Chancellor was: If you invite somebody to your homeland, you do not send them for a lunch to your neighbors,” Zeman was quoted as saying in the far-left U.K. Guardian. “Very polite sentence, isn’t it?”
Despite opposing the German government’s bid to export its rapidly growing Muslim population across Europe, Zeman has argued that what he called “an organized invasion” of Europe by the growing number of Muslims — including “moderate Muslims” — poses a major threat to the West. The Czech leader has also claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood, designated even by some hard-line Islamic dictatorships as a terrorist group, was the mastermind behind the “invasion” of Europe.
Zeman has said publicly that the Islamic migrants will never assimilate into European society and that they should be promptly deported, or at least housed on an uninhabited island until they can be returned home. “Let them have their culture in their countries and not take it to Europe, otherwise it will end up like Cologne,” he was quoted as saying, a reference to the mass sexual assault of women in the German city on New Year’s Eve that authorities tried to cover up.
The seemingly pro-gun rights developments in the Czech Republic run counter to the trend across much of Europe, where governments and the EU have consistently exploited terror attacks and the immigration tsunami to curtail individual rights and liberties across the board. In fact, even the EU super-state, despite its lack of legitimacy and its lack of authority over gun rights, exploited the recent wave of jihad terror attacks to impose further infringements on citizens’ rights to privacy, self-defense, and more. The EU has also exploited the attacks to further centralize power in Brussels.
In addition to opening its borders to the Third World under various guises, the EU has also viciously and lawlessly attacked the gun rights of all European citizens. Last month, citing terror attacks perpetrated by terrorists who ignore gun regulations and even murder laws, the unelected EU Commission released new decrees purporting to ban numerous firearms — including many that are in wide circulation in the Czech Republic and other EU nations. The scheme, which the Czech government opposed, also purports to require “psychological evaluations” for all gun owners, with the results entered into an international database.
Unsurprisingly, the EU’s latest totalitarian demands are unpopular in the Czech Republic and other firearm-friendly nations. The Czech government voted against the new EU gun-control regime but was overruled by other, more totalitarian-minded governments and bureaucrats. And so, it seems, according to news reports, that certain Czech politicians are hoping to use the proposed constitutional changes authorizing citizens to fight terrorists as a tool to sneak the new EU decrees into law domestically. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen.
But with the explosion of terrorist attacks targeting helpless Europeans disarmed by their own governments, the surging public interest in guns and self-defense is likely to grow. Indeed, having witnessed the pathetic spectacle of hundreds of disarmed victims in Paris cowering in front of a few jihadists with illegal guns, more and more Europeans have been rushing to buy weapons for self-defense. And no matter what the EU decrees, the growing demand for guns, gun rights, and self-government is only going to keep escalating — perhaps culminating in the collapse of the totalitarian EU altogether.
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
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