At most this is as legitimate as seizing someone's house because they once sold some pot to a friend in said house. Yeah it's within the letter of the law but it's still dumb and wrong.
"Rearming" a 70yo tank is fundamentally a historical restoration project and the kind of people who do it are no hazard to public health. The law was not written for these kinds of people. It was written for people who are actually up to no good. It's pretty clear from patterns of behavior who is arming tanks to have a cool historically accurate tank and who is doing that sort of thing as a means to a more nefarious end.
Defending this sentence is only a hair away from defending insane drug sentencing "because the law is the law". The law is dumb and if this were the US I'd say the judge has poor judgement for not using his discretion to hand down a practically nonexistent sentence. I don't know to what extent German judges can influence sentencing.
Calling arming a tank a "historical restoration project" is already quite an example of Olympics-level mental gymnastics. And no, it's not comparable to selling pot either.
> The law was not written for these kinds of people. It was written for people who are actually up to no good.
What "good" purpose does arming a tank have then? Authorities don't like to wait and find out, and that's not unreasonable in any way.
> the kind of people who do it are no hazard to public health.
Well they do, you know, keep weapons of war in their homes.
Unless they have 24/7 armed guards and their home is defensible from armed invasion that alone is a pretty sizable risk to public health.
Then of course there is the added factor of what sort of person thinks this is a good idea. If someone is going to have an armed tank, it would be preferable if they also didn't have questionable judgment.
I think the number of people killed in the world each year by personally owned novelty military vehicles is approximately zero. Hundreds of people are killed in the United States every year by unarmed assailants. When will we wake up and pass common-sense karate-chop control?!
How many people would die from personally owned military vehicles if they were not illegal and how many people would die from karate chops if there were (magically enforced) laws banning them?
Please also compare the relative numbers of people with rearmed military vehicles and people with karate-chop capable arms. The important comparison is the conditional probability, not the total numbers.
0 divided by a small number is going to be smaller than a small but nonzero number divided by about seven billion.
If you want to be obtuse you should argue the "tanks in the service of foreign warlords seeking to overthrow their local governments are privately owned" angle.
Something being irrelevant in war between nations doesn't mean that it is irrelevant at all scales. You could make the same argument about a Spanish galleon, and that for historical accuracy it should be stocked with at least a few tons of gunpowder, but I'm still not allowed to stockpile more than 50 pounds of black powder. And that's reasonable, because there's a lot of other uses for large quantities of gunpowder.
Rearming a 70yo tank greatly increases the likelihood for neighborhood disputes to become, um, "explosive".
"Rearming" a 70yo tank is fundamentally a historical restoration project and the kind of people who do it are no hazard to public health. The law was not written for these kinds of people. It was written for people who are actually up to no good. It's pretty clear from patterns of behavior who is arming tanks to have a cool historically accurate tank and who is doing that sort of thing as a means to a more nefarious end.
Defending this sentence is only a hair away from defending insane drug sentencing "because the law is the law". The law is dumb and if this were the US I'd say the judge has poor judgement for not using his discretion to hand down a practically nonexistent sentence. I don't know to what extent German judges can influence sentencing.