Evaluation of the Firearms Directive: Final Report

By European Commission, Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry

This report presents the results of the evaluation study commissioned by Directorate General Enterprise and Industry with the aim of assessing the implementation of the Firearms Directive in all MS. The evaluation aims at providing the necessary input for the report that the European Commission shall, by the end of July 2015, “submit […] to the European Parliament and the Council on the situation resulting from the application of this Directive, accompanied, if appropriate, by amending proposals”. This evaluation is also included in the Commission's Regulatory Fitness and Performance Programme (REFIT), which aims at reviewing the entire stock of EU legislation to identify burdens, inconsistencies, gaps, overlaps and obsolete measures and to make, where necessary, proposals to follow-up on the findings of the review (COM(2013)685 and Annex). The evaluation study addresses five evaluation criteria identified in the Terms of Reference (ToR) that are: 1. Consistency of the implementation of the Directive’s provisions, of the interpretation of the key terms and an overall coherence of the Directive with other pieces of legislation dealing with weapons; 2. Relevance of such provisions with respect to the existing needs in the area of internal market functioning and EU citizens’ security; 3. Effectiveness in terms of the extent to which provisions have contributed to the achievement of set targets, i.e. their actual impacts; 4. Efficiency of procedures and obligations introduced by the Directive, namely if results have been achieved at reasonable costs; 5. Added value of EU intervention as opposed to national legislation and actions.

Brussels: Publications Office, 2014. 106p.