Story highlights Miguel Hahn and Jan-Christophe Hartung photographed gun owners in Germany

Germany's strict gun laws keep firearms largely out of the public eye

(CNN) It's been more than seven years since a 17-year-old dressed in military gear killed 15 people in a shooting spree in Winnenden, Germany, a picturesque little town just outside of Stuttgart.

Since then, a rare shooting tragedy in Germany, the country has implemented a national firearms registry, requiring the owners of 5.5 million legally owned guns to register them with the government.

The scale of gun ownership took photographers Miguel Hahn and Jan-Christophe Hartung by surprise. They learned that Germany -- a bastion of pacifism following the second World War -- has, per capita, the fourth-highest gun ownership of any nation. And so they set about documenting it, the results of which can be found in their eclectic photo series "Firearms and soap bubbles."

The collection seeks to draw comparisons to the much larger and culturally documented American gun culture, they said. On one hand, Germany's strict gun laws keep firearms largely out of the public eye -- and consciousness. But on the other, there are those who seek to replicate the United States' far more libertarian approach to gun control.

Photographers Miguel Hahn and Jan-Christophe Hartung

"We just wanted to see what gun owners in Germany are like, and that's what we tried to find out," Hartung said. "And then we found out that in many ways they are very similar (to the United States), but given the strict gun laws in Germany they're also very different."

Read More