How many weapons are there in Italian homes?

An accidental shot from a legally held rifle. It is a misfortune, an accident what happened in San Felice sul Benano where a 15-year-old girl was killed by a shot from an armed rifle. It would have been the 13-year-old brother to take up the weapon of his father who has a license for hunting use and a dozen weapons in the house.

There are fewer than ten cases like this every year. Many more accidents or murders during hunting, about thirty, but with peaks of double. Household accidents arise mainly from lack of control and bad gun custody. The 57-year-old father of the licensed boys is being investigated on the loose for manslaughter because the gun was his responsibility.

The problem of weapons in Italian homes starts from the numbers. There is no complete census of all those legally held either. There is no official data from the Ministry of the Interior on the number of weapons legally held: estimates range from 8 to 10 million. Explains Giorgio Beretta, analyst of Opal, Permanent Observatory on Small Arms: “The Italian legislation for the number of weapons that can be held is among the most permissive in Europe, with a license for sport shooting or hunting you can keep three pistols, twelve semi-automatic rifles (such as Ar-15, the most used in massacres in America) and an unlimited number of hunting rifles. The rules are too bland and the licenses can be obtained too easily: neither a toxicological examination nor a psychiatric report is required, not even for the elderly, everything is based on a self-certification countersigned by the attending physician and a short examination by the ASL, similar to that for obtaining and renewing the driving license ».

There is no form of insurance for guns kept in the home, only for the hunting license. There are no gun taxes either: only two revenue stamps of 16 euros every 5 years. According to Beretta, having a tax on the possession of weapons would allow to have a more complete picture of their presence, but it would also give the possibility to set up a fund for the victims and to make a real census of the presence of weapons.

“Even just an annual fee of 12-15 euros could be used for both digitize all weapons, many in fact are still on paper records, both, especially to create a fund for victims of legally detained firearms similar to the fund for the victims of road accidents ”adds Beretta.

There is also no cross-referencing of the data between possession of weapons and homicide in the family. «Today in Italy the risk of being killed by a legal gun holder is greater than by the mafia or a robber. This is demonstrated by the comparison of ISTAT data with the data of the OPAL database: in the three-year period 2017-19 there were at least 131 murders perpetrated with weapons regularly detained compared to 91 mafia-type murders and 37 murders for theft or robbery. In 2020, compared to 93 murders of women and femicides, 23 were committed by legal gun owners or with weapons held by them. It is one in four homicides of women ».

With the latest law, which should have been more restrictive by transposing the post-Bataclan European regulations, the meshes seem to have widened instead, apart from the duration of firearms licenses for hunting and sporting use which has dropped from six to five years. The “sporting guns” that can be held went from six to twelve, the shots allowed in magazines went from 15 to 20 for short guns and from 5 to 10 for long guns. There is no obligation to notify their adult cohabitants to possess weapons and the category of “sport shooters” has been extended.

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