Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A political party opposed to mass immigration and inflationary economic policy in Germany has been cited as ineligible to possess firearms for illegal and unconstitutional activities. I know which way to go with this one. Are inflation and mass immigration constitutional? They must be. At the same time, how weird is it that the court can disarm those who do not conform to the Constitution? Imagine trying to pull that off in the United States, where the Constitution says the Government can’t disarm you, and one party in particular can’t stop trying to do it anyway.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has formally placed the AfD under suspicion of working to undermine the country’s democracy. That classification was upheld in May by an administrative court, which rejected an AfD lawsuit over the designation.
“Merely membership in a party suspected of anti-constitutional activities regularly leads to the presumption of ineligibility under gun law under the applicable strict standards of gun law, even if the party has not been banned by the Federal Constitutional Court on the grounds of unconstitutionality,” reads an English translation of the Düsseldorf Administrative Court’s decision.
Continuing, the ruling explains that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution assessed that the AfD demonstrates a strong indication of anti-constitutional behavior, which was confirmed in an earlier judgment by the Higher Administrative Court for the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
AfD is alleged to have some wingnuts in it, including a bloke who said that not every Waffen SS soldier was a criminal. That’ll get you some attention, especially when political opponents were already comparing them to Nazis with perhaps more frequency and enthusiasm than US Democrats do everyone who dares to disagree with them. I’m not here to confirm or deny AfD’s tyrannical diagnosis. If this is legitimate German law, it is their law, and they have every reason to be nervous. But this hardly seems to be the biggest problem if law and order are the concern. Immigrant men attacking Germans is a greater risk to the people and the State. A problem that, should you dare to take a public position, can get you disarmed and left defenseless, assured only that the state will put a chalk outline around your body while refusing to name any suspect of a violent crime who might be of color or (gasp!) Middle-Eastern, which I can only assume would be considered fascist behavior.
German citizens, in other words, are increasingly living in fear for their lives at the hands of the government. Is that in the Constitution, too?
