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Despite industry’s safer image, gun regulation remains lax in Turkey
January 06, 2013, Sunday/ 15:27:00
“Things just aren’t what they used to be,” may seem like a knee-jerk truism in Turkey, but few seem to say it with more conviction than Fatih Demirok, a counter clerk at a gun store in İstanbul’s old banking and warehouse district of Karaköy.
“Things have changed quite a bit in the gun industry. You can’t just walk in and buy a gun these days,” the 25 year old says from behind a counter of neatly arrayed shotguns and hunting rifles. “There’s a detailed process with an emphasis on safety.”
That’s the official line taken by many gun dealers in Turkey, where they say a botched shooting at İstanbul’s Topkapı Palace in 2011 ushered in tighter gun laws and made the buying process more regulated than ever. Mentions of the recent shooting of 27 people in the American town of Newtown, Connecticut aren’t uncommon either.
Obtaining a license “takes at least a month and includes three steps: getting a physical checkup from a doctor, a note from a psychiatrist and a criminal background check from the police,” says one attendant at the three-story gun and sporting goods store Silah Dünyası (Gun World) in Avcılar, İstanbul. “Assault rifles are strictly illegal and getting your hands on a pistol is almost impossible,” he says. Realistically, “you can buy a shotgun or hunting rifle if you can get through the hoops.” But that portrait of lengthy procedures is far from an accurate picture and the legal process of obtaining a shotgun or hunting rifle remains remarkably easy, Sunday’s Zaman found.
“I don’t think it should be a problem, it will only take 10 minutes or so,” a psychiatrist at one İstanbul hospital said over the phone when asked if he would perform a mental evaluation for the license. “If you don’t have any past mental problems, this will be a formality.”
If the psychiatric evaluation is supposed to root out potentially dangerous applicants, the “hasty nature” of most evaluations undermines its purpose, says psychiatrist Armağan Samancı, who says he has performed several thousand such tests over his career. “The process is absurd because it is impossible to make a diagnosis about a patient within 10 minutes,” he laments. Ten minutes is often how long the questionnaire lasts, the doctor says, adding that the survey’s questions simply ask a patient if they have any known psychological disorders. “The test is just ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions. It is an archaic exam.”
Samancı and two other psychiatrists told one Turkish daily in 2001 that after collectively performing over 7,000 such examinations, they found that rejecting an application often resulted in license seekers “exiting one office and entering the next” until they found someone willing to certify them.
“Mental health issues are not always identifiable. If someone exhibits deeply antisocial behavior or has post-traumatic stress disorder, it may not be apparent. They will eventually be certified,” one of Samancı’s fellow peers, psychiatrist Ayhan Akçan, told Sunday’s Zaman. “One can only learn as much as the patient wants to reveal, and in 10 minutes it’s easy to hide things,” he added.
One easy step that they recommended in 2001 has yet to be considered by lawmakers. “There should be a shared hospital database that tracks these requests,” said Samancı. “It would stop this practice of going ‘from office to office’.” Sadly, Samancı says, the procedures haven’t changed in a decade. Indeed, Turkey’s firearms law has barely changed at all since it was implemented in the mid 1950s, says Berna Pehlevan, a coordinator at the anti-gun Umut Foundation. Its regulation of weapons is long out of date, she says, arguing that the law has no mention of gun safety education, legal liability in the case of a gun accident or the required purchase of gun locks, all of which are familiar elements of gun laws in the US and Europe. The law also allows for some “startling” liberties, she says. Applicants must get approval from the police to obtain a gun, but while “it looks like ex-criminals can’t buy weapons,” violent offenders are only barred from owning a gun a year after being released from prison.
The only major amendment to the law was made in 2011 after a Libyan man armed with a shotgun wounded two people at İstanbul’s Topkapı Palace before being gunned down by the police. The gunman had purchased the weapon from a gun shop on the same day. The law was amended to allow foreigners to take possession of weapons they purchased in Turkey only when exiting the country, several gun shop owners told Sunday’s Zaman....
....There may be as many as 9.5 million illegal guns in Turkey, compared to 2.5 million licensed ones, a fact which Pehlevan says is proof of how little emphasis the police have placed on the even more serious problem of gun trafficking in the country. The first step, however, “is at least better regulation,” she says. “Whether legal or illegal guns, it's long past time to get better industry regulations in place.”
Today's Zaman, your gateway to Turkish daily news
In Turkiye there is no right to keep and bear firearms, there is a licensing requirement, assault rifles and pistols very difficult to acquire legally, psychiatric approval police approval and permit is required. Nor do I think Turkiye has open carry, and I doubt anyone can legally conceal carry without a permit and whether conceal carry permits are even possible to get for most citizens.
Turkey has a low gun culture compared to US, Serbia, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Russia, Pakistan, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, France, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, Macedonia, Greece, etc.
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