https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blEiQHy3_gw

In 2010, it was reported that the Russian Parliament was considering loosening gun control laws to allow Russians who legally own firearms to carry them for the purposes of self defense. The Russian Justice Minister, Alexander Konovalov was firmly against the possibility. In 2013, it was reported that the Russian organization, Right to Bear Arms, had only 1,000 members.  It was founded by Maria Butina . . .

 

Now we learn that Russian law has been changed to allow the civil population to carry lethal weapons for self defense.

From rt.com:

Until now Russian gun enthusiasts were only permitted to carry firearms for hunting or target shooting after obtaining a license through the Interior Ministry. Russian gun licenses are to be renewed every five years, and applicants face strict background checks and are required to take gun safety courses.

The addendum to the law now lists self-defense as a legally acceptable reason for carrying a weapon.

It is not clear who exactly will be able to qualify to own pistols, for example. It’s not impossible to obtain a license to own a shotgun in Russia, but a person has to be a shotgun owner for several years before they may purchase a rifle.

The change in the law is likely related to a petition submitted by over 100,000 Russians to allow firearms to be used to defend their residences. The petition was submitted in February of 2014, for the third time. There are said to be five million legal firearms owners in Russia, though there are many more who own firearms without legal sanction.

                    Demonstration for the right to bear arms in Moscow

The movement to create a right to bear arms is fairly young in Russia, but it appears to have scored a significant victory.

©2014 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
Gun Watch

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72 COMMENTS

    • You must be mistaken.

      I don’t see the right of self defense listed under the United Nation’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

      I mean, isn’t that where we get our rights? From bureaucrats?

        • That third line wasn’t there when he first posted the comment, matey. Take that away and the sarcasm becomes a bit harder to pick up.

      • I know it’s sarcasm, but actually there’s Article 3: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”

        If everyone has the right to life, liberty AND security of person… therefor anyone has the_right_ to protect his life, his liberty and his security of person. I know, this is not as clear and well written as the US Second Amendment, but there’s still something there.

        • You shouldn’t have mentioned that. Now the UN will have to change it to read “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person until the government decides to end that right.”

        • With how often people want to “misread” the 2A(which is pretty clear), that seems like a lost cause.

    • They have a looooooong way to go in the human rights category, but this is a step in the right direction.

  4. Perhaps they are going to protect their country like we should and have all these years!

    Just do the opposite of this liberal administration and you pretty much get it right!

    • I laugh every time someone calls Obama a liberal or refers to the administration as liberal. Just about every liberal I know complains how they thought they were voting for a liberal but got a corporate sell-out.

      If Obama were a liberal, we wouldn’t have the ridiculous piece of legislation known as the ACA — no self-respecting liberal would require citizens to be customers of giant corporations.

      • Only if you believe every liberal was as pure as the wind driven snow. Ends justify the means. As Senate Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid once admitted, ACA was only a stepping stone to single payer system. My guess is that they are hoping to collapse the current system in order to swoop in like white (or half-white) knights with a government instituted takeover. Or maybe use the Fabian Socialist approach. Than again, when you regulate any large scale industry to the degree the Federal Government does with banks, medical or insurance industries, the line between crony capitalism and socialism is indeed blurred.

  5. First the czars, then the commisars and now Putin. Russia has never been a free country. Not long ago a girl band went to prison for singing about Putin.

    Any step in the direction of legal gun use is a major step. Good on them.

  6. When I hear anything about Russia and guns I think about these two links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
    Way fewer guns than in the U.S. and way higher intentional homicide rate.
    Appears to be no correlation at all between these two except possibly a reverse correlation.
    Not sure what is going on in Russia but they must be a bunch of homicidal maniacs even without their guns.

    • As de Tocqueville would say, Russian and the U.S. share many similarities. We’re both frontier cultures, and with that comes a propensity to solve problems through individual initiative. This means the criminal class is more likely to resort to their version of individual initiative, violence.

      Our historical solution is to liberalize gun ownership so good guys can keep the bad guys in check. Russia’s historical solution was to disarm the populace and centralize police authority. As you can plainly see, our solution has more-or-less worked while theirs has repeatedly failed. If we implemented Russia’s historical solution, our violence rates would easily match theirs.

  7. Is it possible that Russia of all places will eventually have more freedom as defined by our founding fathers then many places in the United States? I’m looking at you, MD, NY, NJ, MA, awww hell who am I kidding, I’m looking at the east coast everything North of TN and West to CO. And yes I see you hiding over there CA, OR, and WA.

    Oh the irony!

  8. Does Bill DeBlasio know that this is the new commie doctrine? ‘Cause if he does — gun rights in New York City! Yay!

    • Historically, communists have always supported strong gun rights in bourgeois democracies. Makes proletarian revolution that much easier.

        • Re-read what I wrote. They support gun rights in _bourgeois democracies_ – the formation that they believe inevitably precedes the communist revolution. After the revolution, it’s a whole other kettle of fish.

          • Not that I have seen. All the Soviet and Chinese propaganda that I have seen on the issue castigated the U.S. for allowing it citizens to have so many guns. All the pro-communist groups in the U.S. are pro-gun control, that I recall.

            Feel free to come up with counter examples. Why do you think that they support gun rights in “bourgeois democracies”?

        • Have you considered that the countries passing as communist may in fact be simple dictatorships using communism as an idealistic veil? Like so many “republks” out there. None of those places you named even come close to the Marxist ideology. IMO it is simply proof that Communism is a fantasy that can’t exist so long as humans are the subject.

        • Soviet (after Stalin) and Chinese (from the get go) communist parties should more properly be called social fascist – they abandoned most of the original Marxist rhetoric and went into full on totalitarian state mode (to remind, the original premise that Marx had wrt communism is that it was supposed to be a classless and stateless society – so anyone who’s preaching the virtues of a strong state for anything other than a transitional period is basically not a communist by definition). The other aspect of it is that Soviets never missed an opportunity to criticize the West over anything they could possibly think of, including things that were also problems (just not publicized ones) for themselves. “And you are lynching negroes” was a keystone of anti-US Soviet propaganda, even when USSR was deporting whole nations, or later when it was persecuting Jews.

          OTOH, if you look at Russia before Stalin – basically, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, ruled by Lenin and his cadre – they had a very utilitarian approach to this. For example, in 1918, Lenin enacted a decree promoting gun ownership for the “working people” (workers and peasants), and requiring disarmament of “hostile classes” (bourgeois). This same thing was written into the Constitution of RSFSR. Later on, they basically made ownership conditional on party membership (but it’s still a huge category, to remind, there were over 10 million people in the party).

  9. Looks like they made an obscure change in the gun law which created an ambiguity that some interpreted as allowing uncased long guns to be carried for self-defense, which caused some excitement in the press. The Ministry of Internal Affairs clarified that this was just a technical correction. According to the spokesman, only non-lethal handguns could and still can be carried with a proper license (may issue?) – and that means no firearms outside one’s home (unless hunting or while engaged in shooting sports).

    This will likely go away, although stranger things have happened. I would certainly wait for the final word on this.

    • This exactly. Nothing to see here, move along. Russia still sucks big time as far as gun laws go, and self-defense laws are a nightmare (it still has the concept of “limits of admissible self-defense”, meaning that if you shoot someone who was trying to stick you with a knife, you have a good chance of ending in prison for murder).

      Read this (run through Google Translate as needed) for details:
      http://www.gazeta.ru/social/2014/11/18/6305881.shtml

    • As a Russian citizen and a gun owner, I confirm what Dave said.
      There have been no major changes.
      We still can’t legally own or carry handguns, apart from crappy less-lethal versions.
      We can only purchase a rifle after owning a shotgun for five years.
      For every weapon you need to apply for a separate license for purchase, all guns are to be registered with the police.
      The recent changes amount to technicalities and a couple of nice perks, like being able to transport 1000 rounds of ammo at a time, instead of just 400.

  11. When Putin is done disarming Ukraine they will have a lot of “used” guns for sale in Russia.
    Of course mostly to former KGB and Commi party members.

    • Please explain the humor in this image? I don’t get it. Seriously… 😛

      I just saw this while searching for information about the Russian gun rights group whose leader was indicted today under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. Don’t really know what to think about that because there’s so much countervailing information.

  15. Good on the Russians for trying to bury their past and bring change from within, ’cause we all know a little cosmetic work on their flag hasn’t done jack in 23 years.

  16. I wish the citizenry of Russia well. Self-defense carrying is an excellent reason, and though I hope the Putin puppets in Parliament will approve of this, I have my doubts. Fake strongmen do not want competition.

  19. Don’t doubt for a minute that permits are issued to the connected, and once registered can be confiscated.
    You aren’t gonna see the mafia, or chechens applying.

    Russia under Putin is an oligarchy of corrupt elites, run by a ruthless former KGB sociopath with dreams of neo-czarist empire building. You might as well move to Mexico if you fancy yourself an internationale loving elite. Warmer, too.

      • @Allen The US is far from perfect but it is not nearly the equivalent to Russia. They’re much more corrupt and far more flagrant in abridging individual rights and economic independence.

  23. Has anyone seen the photo posted on RT’s story? Are those 12 gauge pepperbox guns? If that is what I’m seeing, hot damn. That will hurt on either end of the firearm. I’d imagine they sell it with a vodka stock, you finish the bottle and it feels just like a Monte Carlo. /end shameless Russian joke
    http://rt.com/news/206703-russia-guns-self-defense/

  24. I wonder how the 2A tug-O-war might change here in the USA if the NRA Chairperson looked like this lady (young, attractive, professional), and all the spokespersons were cut from like fabric?

    Honestly. She is easy to look at and comfortable to listen to. The softness of her presentation is welcoming and disarming, while maintaining an intelligent, confident assertiveness that the job requires.

    To make my point more clear, who might be more effective at wooing more adherents to 2A causes: A) The American equivalent of Butina, or B) Ted Nugent?

    Don’t get me wrong, I find Ted to be the kind of guy I would like to spend a weekend hunting with. That would be a blast! I just wish gun rights spokespersons were more like Maria Butina.

  26. Good for you People of Russia. Never ever let them take them away from you. It is your God given right.

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