Under legislation to be put to a vote in parliament next month, Germany's gun owners, who number between 10 and 12 million, would be subject to unannounced random checks of how and where they store their weapons.

If guns are accessible to anyone other than the license holder, that person will be subject to punishment. If a judge finds that someone deliberately allowed adolescents access to firearms, that person will face a prison sentence.

The age of those allowed to use high-caliber firearms will also be raised from 14 to 18. The Social Democrats wanted to ban high-caliber rifles altogether, but the ministers agreed not to go that far.

The bill also tightens up penalties for those who neglect the terms of gun licenses, which are required before being allowed to possess a weapon in Germany.

Response to school shooting

“Our aim is to make it harder for young people to get access to guns,” said Germany's Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, in response to criticism of the amendment on Wednesday.

After the school rampage in March, the government was pressured to toughen gun laws in the country to prevent further juvenile attacks. In that attack, one of the deadliest in Germany, Tim K., a 17-year-old former student at a school in Winnenden in the southwest of the country, used a gun owned by his father to shoot nine of his fellow students, three teachers and three others, before killing himself.

The German government had also considered banning paintball, a real-life shooting game in which teams ambush one another with paint pellets, but the measure was dropped from the bill.

One of Merkel's aides said the chancellor would invite parliament to pass a resolution calling for a prohibition of paintball at a later date, adding, however, that such a ban could be promulgated by regulation.

Changes upset hunters

The proposed changes have stirred public debate in Germany, with many of the country's hunters, especially, opposed.

In Germany, there are over 365,000 registered hunters. To gain the right to hunt, one must complete hunter safety schooling and a series of gun training courses. The crime rate among hunters in the country is very low, which has caused some, like Reinhard Wolf, a hunter in Bonn, to voice his opposition against the toughened laws.

“To be honest, it upsets me a little bit. Among us hunters, the rate of someone using their gun to commit a crime is something like 0.0001 percent. Just because other people break the law with their guns, doesn't mean that the people who actually follow the rules should have to follow even tougher laws. I don't think that's how it should be,” he said.

Interior Minister Schaeuble has said that the changes to the gun law were made to raise the general awareness of the country's gun owners, but hunters like Reinhard Wolf say this awareness, part of obligatory hunter safety courses, is already thoroughly ingrained in the hunting community.

glb/dpa/AFP

Editor: Chuck Penfold