Gun News - Arming Europe

An Italian news agency, ANSA, is reporting that a shipment of 800 rifles has been stopped and confiscated in Trieste. The article described the haul as being "Winchester SXP rifles". The shipment was on a Dutch truck with a Turkish driver. Oooo, scary. The tipoff was the accompanying picture

The weapons pictured above don't seem like what I was expecting and the .22 on the bottom certainly isn't the weapon of choice for either a terrorist or a citizen defender. Not being the worlds most geeky gun nut, I had to look up the Winchester SXP:

Yup, a 12 ga pump shotgun. It's available in a variety of configurations including a 20" version with a pistol grip but still... Then the light went on. A week or two back I saw an article mentioning that in Austria guns were becoming a hot item among the citizens and since pistols were all but banned, shotguns were the fall back choice. This even to the point that Austria was sold out of shotguns. From what I was hearing, Germany, Holland and Belgium, the guns destination, were to about the same state.

So some capitalist in Northern Europe is trying to take advantage of a sudden sellers market in the only guns the public is allowed to own, and the Italian cops caught him at it. The big beef seemed to be that all the paperwork had not been submitted. You would think that any reputable importer of firearms in Europe would know to provide the truck driver with a couple of envelopes filled with expediting paperwork of appropriate denominations to handle situations like this, but I guess you just can't get good help any more anywhere.