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Russian lower house tighten firearm license requirements

The bill prohibits issuing licenses to citizens with two or more served prison terms

© Mikhail Metzel/TASS

MOSCOW, May 18. /TASS/. Russian State Duma (parliament's lower house) passed a bill in the first reading, which introduces additional ground for denial of firearm purchase license.

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‘Terrible catastrophe, barbaric crime’: Putin mourns victims of Kazan school shooting

The bill prohibits issuing licenses to citizens with two or more served prison terms. The ban also covers people punished for drunk driving or giving vehicle control to a drunk driver, as well as people who refused to undergo an inebriation test - until the administrative penalty ends.

The bill also imposes a ban on dissemination of manuals on production, modification or restoration of firearms in mass media or the Internet. Currently, such rule only covers explosives. Websites with manuals on firearm manufacturing will be banned.

The bill also introduces new grounds for invalidation of issued licenses: refusing to present weapon storage or the weapon itself to authorities for inspection. Decommissioned firearms will now be banned for storage without notification to authorities. Companies will be prohibited from storing firearms in rooms without an alarm connected to the central security panel.

The bill was introduced in December last year. Earlier, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov disclosed that President Vladimir Putin ordered to tighten the gun control rules after the shooting in the Kazan school number 175, which left 9 people killed (7 of them children) and 23 injured.

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