Gun rights in Austria? Is that a thing? It may be now that there are immigrants flooding the region in the tens of thousands. The Austrians may not be embracing that whole multiculturalism wave that’s sweeping some EU governments because the citizens are apparently lining up at gun shops and emptying the businesses of shotguns. (Daily Mail)

Weapon sales are soaring in Austria as citizens of the small Alpine nation become paranoid over the numbers of refugees crowding into their country.

In a country of 8.5 million people, there are now an estimated 900,000 firearms in homes.

And gun dealers report that it is women driving the sales rush. This year alone, police say 70,000 guns have been sold.

‘Virtually all shotguns are currently sold out, because you need no permit for them’, said Thomas Ortner, spokesman for an arms dealer in Upper Austria.

I’ll confess that I’m not really up to speed on gun laws in most of Europe beyond the fact that the majority of those countries don’t provide the same protections which the Second Amendment does in America. But it seems that you need a license for everything except a shotgun. (I suppose that makes at least some sense since shotguns are popular for hunting.) The lines outside the government offices where you apply for a license for other types of weapons are long, so people are clearly concerned. Of course, in well trained hands a shotgun can be a very effective line of home defense as well. (Side note: do not attend the Joe Biden school of shotgun training prior to use.)

According to the people actually selling the weapons it is reiterated that a surprising number of the new customers are ladies.

‘Because of the social change, people want to protect themselves,’ one arms dealer told the broadcaster oe.24. He said ‘many women’ were among his customers.

The flood of ‘refugees’ into Austria is continuing without interruption.

Does this really come as any surprise? Impoverished people, most of whom don’t speak the language and who come from a very different culture, are flooding into the area. Break-ins, robberies and rapes are an obvious danger and if you’re not taking steps to protect yourself you’re just asking to be a target. Are their concerns shocking to anyone? In Germany there have been repeated accusations that the government is downplaying a rise in crimes – particularly sexual assaults – where the migrants are congregating. (Reuters)

Germany’s police union and women’s rights groups accused the authorities on Tuesday of playing down reports of harassment, sexual assault and even rape at refugee shelters because they feared a backlash against asylum seekers…

But police union chief Rainer Wendt said he believed that authorities in Germany’s federal states, which are responsible for housing asylum seekers, were playing down the problem of assaults on women in the shelters.

“It is understandable that there is the desire to calm things down politically,” Wendt told Reuters. But he, along with women’s groups, believed that ignoring the problem would be counterproductive. “There is a lot of glossing over going on. But this doesn’t represent reality,” he said.

This should be a cautionary tale on both sides of the Atlantic, and here are a few things to remember: Open borders don’t work. Nationalism and pride in your country are not dirty words or phrases. A nation’s citizens define what their culture is and there is nothing wrong with wanting to preserve it. If you invite a flood of people from another culture to overrun your borders you are pretty much getting what you asked for.

But there’s always a silver lining to every cloud, eh? Maybe Austria is on their way to getting their own Second Amendment.