Germany considering stricter gun control rules amid spike in far-right crime

Germany’s government this week advanced a series of proposals for stricter background checks for guns in the wake of a series of violent anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant crimes, according to The New York Times.

Recent incidents include the assassination of a conservative politician whose name appeared on a neo-Nazi hit list and the killing of two people at a synagogue on Yom Kippur.

“The threat from far-right extremism and far-right terrorism, and with them anti-Semitism, is high in Germany and we can’t stress it often enough,” Horst Seehofer, Germany’s interior minister, said at a news conference. The proposals must still be approved by Parliament.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government also advanced legislation that would toughen Germany’s 2018 law barring hate speech online, which fines Facebook, Google and Twitter up to 50 million euros for failure to remove “obviously illegal content” within 24 hours.