Call for Arms Resonates Across Poland

SZCZECIN, Poland — The shooting gallery behind the main train station here has security doors thick enough to withstand a bomb attack. There are no signs directing customers, and admittance is by appointment only.

Inside, proprietor Jacek Trojanowski, dressed in a black turtleneck and double-breasted sport coat, sips tea. The dim, windowless concrete bunker--erected by the Nazis nearly 60 years ago as an air-raid shelter--renders his skin translucent.

“I have been here 4 1/2 years, and this year I have plans to renovate it and make it into a nice place with the kind of customer service you would expect,” he said. “There is a natural desire among people to own weapons; it’s just that the political and social situation in Poland hasn’t allowed it.”

Trojanowski’s ensconced firing range is a novelty in Poland, one of just a few private shooting galleries in a country where the right to bear arms is strictly limited by Communist-era regulations. About 11,300 inhabitants of this rowdy river port region of 1 million have permission to own a firearm--and all but 170 of them are restricted to hunting and sporting rifles or tear-gas-type pistols.

But Trojanowski and gun enthusiasts across Poland are emerging from tenebrous hideaways, spurred by a growing fear of crime and a nascent self-defense movement.

For the first time since World War II, ordinary Poles are demanding access to firearms for personal security, setting off an emotional 2nd Amendment-style debate over the competing demands of public order and personal freedom in the former East Bloc’s biggest democracy.

“Most of the people who come here want to learn how to shoot just like in the Westerns,” said Trojanowski, who opens his gallery to several hundred gun owners every year. “They know the criminal world today is organized, desperate--and armed.”

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The popular call to arms already resonates in the halls of Parliament, where packing a pistol is so routine that placards remind lawmakers to leave their weapons at the door. Last month, Interior Minister Leszek Miller, the country’s top law enforcement official, disclosed on national television that he had owned a pistol for two years before applying for the required permit.

In a sign of the times, the wily former Communist not only saw no need to run for political cover, but he playfully posed with the contraband before a rush of photographers.

“In a democratic country, every citizen should have the right to possess something that he thinks is necessary for his safety,” Miller said in an interview. “I don’t think more weapons on the street necessarily mean more safety. However, if someone feels he needs a weapon, and he meets the requirements, then he should be able to have one.”

Miller need look no farther than the corridors of his own ministry to find opponents of this Hatfields and McCoys construction of democracy. Fearing a surge in criminal shootouts and neighborhood gunfights, police officials across Poland are speaking out against looser controls, even if it means a showdown with their powerful boss in Warsaw.

Police estimate that hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons are already circulating in the country, most bought from Russian soldiers who unloaded arsenals when retreating from their Warsaw Pact outposts in the early 1990s. In the latest sensational discovery, authorities in the southern city of Czestochowa last month uncovered an illegal cache of Soviet-made rifles, handguns, land mines and an armor-piercing rocket launcher.

Violent crime, moreover, continues its astronomical climb, even though the overall rate dropped in 1996 for the first time since the fall of communism.

Armed robberies have surged 1,650% since 1990, and, according to the Interior Ministry, illegal weapons have been used in every incident prosecuted by authorities.

“Police all over the world are against greater numbers of weapons,” said Andrzej Przemyski of the National Police. “The more legal weapons there are, the more illegal weapons as well. And it is the criminals who will always have the advantage.”

So far, the ruling coalition has dismissed police objections as overly cautious and undemocratic and is moving forward with controversial plans to overhaul gun control regulations.

The government is expected to introduce legislation this month that would dramatically alter the existing statute, enacted in 1961 at a time when widespread access to weapons was ideologically precluded.

The law now allows local police to reject gun permit applicants without cause, leading to complaints of cronyism, discrimination and corruption.

“It is impossible in a democratic country to maintain a law that gives a relatively low organ of the police such arbitrary power over issuing [gun] permits,” Miller said. “It is not something that should be left to some guy sitting somewhere making his decision for some reason.”

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The new regulations, according to a draft approved by the Cabinet, would make weapons readily available to almost any healthy, law-abiding citizen older than 21 who passed a written and practical examination. The criteria for receiving a permit would be spelled out in the law, and the discretion of local police commanders would be removed.

In some respects, the new law would make gun ownership more difficult: It would raise the legal age for possessing arms from 18; would demand a demonstrated ability to handle the weapon; would require health and psychological checkups every five years; and would classify everything from brass knuckles to air pistols as small arms regulated by authorities.

But as a practical matter, gun advocates say, none of the new restrictions would compare to the unwritten obstruction that has kept the vast majority of Poles unarmed for the last four decades.

By making the permit process so unpredictable and onerous, police admit, authorities have discouraged almost everyone from applying.

Last year in Szczecin, for example, fewer than 400 people requested a gun permit, and almost one-third of those were refused.

“Not only is the procedure complicated, but under communism they delved so deeply into the private life of anyone who wanted a gun that people gave up trying,” said Tadeusz de Virion, a prominent criminal attorney who recently represented a woman acquitted in a sensational murder case in which she shot a thief with her husband’s hunting rifle.

In cities such as Szczecin, a thriving border town where trade in sex, drugs and stolen cars is the grist of daily life, the new push for wider access to arms excites crime-weary residents but raises the hackles of police and city officials.

Szczecin suffers from one of the highest crime rates in Poland--still modest by big-city American standards, but shocking when compared with the situation here a decade ago.

Overall crime has jumped 182% since 1989, while armed robberies soared 30% last year alone. The number of murders tripled between 1988 and 1995.

Embarrassed city officials tell of thieves driving off with the cars of foreign dignitaries during visits to City Hall. Shocked police point to a busy street corner where a man was recently gunned down in an apparent contract killing. A veteran taxi driver relates his three brushes with death, all involving armed passengers. On the outskirts of town, a new housing development made local history by hiring private security guards to patrol the grounds.

“I am not unhappy about what is happening in Szczecin because of the business I am in, but for the average citizen it is not a good situation,” said Ireneusz Nowak, director of Agencja Ochrony AeSDe, one of the city’s biggest private security firms. “People are feeling threatened like never before.”

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At the gleaming Safari Gun shop in the high-crime city center, Tadeusz Wisniewski, a merchant seaman in a leather jacket and felt cap, was stocking up on ammunition for his gas pistol. The weapon affords little protection, he complained, but it is better than nothing for his precarious journey home at night. If a new gun law is approved, he said, he will be first in line for a firearm, although the cheapest would set back the average Polish worker about a week’s salary, including the permit fee.

“The best situation would be if no one had a gun, but we must accept that times have changed,” Wisniewski said.

Safari Gun owner Krzysztof Majkowski predicted a huge increase in gun permit applications if the law changes.

In recent years, he said, self-defense has become a booming business in Poland. The shop’s glass display counter is littered with popular gun magazines, such as Komandos and Colt, as well as the latest craze in personal protection: a videotape on self-defense tactics.

“It looks like we are finally going to get a piece of Texas right here in Poland,” gun shop manager Jan Milewski said.

Police Officer Janusz Warachowski, taking a reporter on his night patrol, said he understands the popular fascination with weapons.

Warachowski, 30, carries a sidearm two years older than he is, while the criminals he faces are equipped with the stuff of modern warfare.

The towering, burly cop confesses to feeling outgunned on the job--and especially vulnerable after hours in his own home.

But Warachowski, like most police officers, is convinced that fighting fire with fire is not the answer.

More guns, he said, will only make things worse; just look at the violence in the United States.

“If we are going to follow examples from the West, I think we should follow the good ones, not the bad ones,” he said. “The changes associated with democracy in this country have come so fast that people have a distorted view of what democracy means, that it only involves rights. Actually, democracy brings both rights and responsibilities.”

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With that in mind, Szczecin police and city officials have recently launched a “safe city” program modeled after British crime-prevention efforts.

After two years of sociological and other studies, the city has begun pumping money into everything from drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers to new parks and playgrounds. The city has also endorsed a private initiative offering free courses in self-defense to working women, particularly those who work at night.

Deputy Mayor Pawel Bartnik, who heads the program, said city officials believe that Szczecin would be safer if there were fewer, not more, weapons.

“We realize that the growth in crime is irreversible, that freedom has its costs, and this is one of them,” Bartnik said. “The problem is how to make it as marginal as possible.”

Police Maj. Piotr Owczarek, who heads Szczecin’s gun-permit division, said opponents of the new gun legislation have by no means surrendered.

As written, he said, the draft is open to interpretation and police will argue that it preserves their broad discretion over permits.

In the end, Owczarek predicted, gun enthusiasts will realize that Poland has no equivalent of the U.S. Constitution’s 2nd Amendment--and that such a sweeping entitlement would be inappropriate.

“It is important to look at the history of each country,” he said. “In the United States, there is a long tradition of protecting private property with weapons, while in Poland being armed has meant protecting the country from outside enemies, usually in a war. Right now, the American standard is being transferred to the situation in Poland, but it does not belong.”