Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 16 – The Russian Federation doesn’t have a real equivalent of the National Rifle Association in the US, and so it is gun producers who are leading the charge to “soften” a restrictive new law, adopted at Vladimir Putin’s insistence after the Kazan school shootings.
But many observers think that the producers are more concerned about overall profit than domestic sales and are taking this tack in order to compensate for losses in sales of guns and ammunition to the West because of American-led sanctions (profile.ru/society/prinuzhdenie-k-razoruzheniju-itogi-goda-dlya-rynka-grazhdanskogo-strelkovogo-oruzhiya-977304/).
According to Mikhail Degtyarev, the editor of Kalashnikov, a magazine about guns in Russia, they aren’t likely to succeed. And the government will likely impose still great controls on gun ownership because Russia’s current leaders don’t believe there is any reason for the population to be armed.
Mikhail Krechmar, who edits a Russian hunting magazine, agrees. He sees prices for guns and ammunition continuing to skyrocket as Russians seek to buy more guns and ammo in a marketplace where fewer are available. And as a result, some won’t get what they want but others will turn underground to get them or to make guns they possess more powerful.
They appear to be doing that already. Between 2015 and 2020, Russian police seized more than 70,000 firearms that violated the law and closed down “more than 400 underground” factories where older weapons were being upgraded to satisfy the demands of the market. It is unlikely that the police have been able to shut down this trade completely.
Krechmar argues as do gun rights advocates in other countries that the powers that be in Moscow are making a mistake by concentrating “not on the causes of crimes but on weapons.” But they are in the driver’s seat, and he says he will “eat my hat” if the gun manufacturers are able to achieve anything that benefits those who own guns or want to.
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