Police struggling with gun control: 3,000 gun owners didn't get home checks last year
The police are struggling to keep up with gun control, specifically the unannounced home visit each firearm license holder should get every three years. Last year, over 20,000 should have been checked, but almost 3,000 didn’t see a single police officer, AD and RTL Nieuws report based on figures requested from the police.
Over 65,000 gun owners in the Netherlands must get a police visit once every three years. In the past three years, over four out of five were checked. Amsterdam came closest to the standard with a control rate of 94 percent. Limburg and Oost-Brabant had the most trouble, with almost 30 percent and 25 percent of gun owners not getting a home visit in the past three years.
The supervision is not optimal, Toon Moeskops, Police Tasks Advisor of the National Police, told AD. “If you look at the numbers, that’s true. We need to work harder to catch up, but we also shouldn’t make it more negative than it is. The lion’s share of all gun owners have had a home visit.”
According to Moeskops, some gun owners go unchecked because these home visits are a secondary task for all officers who work in the neighborhoods. They do the unannounced checks during quiet times in their day, which are sometimes nonexistent. “We want to achieve the standard, so we now have to work more systematically. I am confident that we will achieve our goals again in the future,” he said.
The Netherlands tightened its gun control after a mass shooting in a shopping center in Alphen aan den Rijn in 2011. Seven people, including the gunman, died, and 17 others got hurt.
Early this year, it became clear that the controls aren’t watertight. Gun owner Richard K. shot and killed 44-year-old Ineke Mussche and her husband, 38-year-old Przemyslaw "Sam" Czerniawski, in Weiteveen after a year-long dispute about the condition of a home the couple bought from him. He used illegal firearms in the shooting, but according to experts, the police should have revoked his gun license when the real estate conflict heated up. The investigation against K. is ongoing.
