De Nardis, Paolo and Roberta Iannone. 2019 ‘Firearm Owners.’ Safety and Legality: Weapons in the Homes of Italians (Sicurezza e Legalità: le Armi nelle Case degli Italiani). Rome: Università La Sapienza. 12 April

Relevant contents

There is no official data on the number of legally owned weapons in Italy.

This is due to the fact that most of the existing and legally possessed weapons have been reported by their owners, even in very remote times, to the local public security office competent for the territory (police station, or, where there is no police station, Carabinieri station command), which entered them in the paper registers. With the advent of computerisation, only a small part of the weapons registered in the past in the paper registers have been uploaded in the database of the Police Information System; this system therefore in general reports mostly the weapons that have been purchased or sold only after its entry into use, and not those registered in the old registers.

[…] [It] is not even possible to know, at present, the number of legal arms holders in Italy. This is because this number is not only made up of holders of firearms licences, permits to purchase and possess, and collectors' licences, but also of those who have purchased and registered firearms on the basis of a firearms licence which was valid at the time, but which they subsequently allowed to expire without renewing it. Such persons are treated as permit holders, but are not in fact holders of a valid licence, and are therefore not subject to ordinary registration. Their number is significant, in consideration of the fact that in the 70's, for example, the holders of a rifle licence for hunting use numbered approximately 2,300,000, against 700,000 in the present period. Significant, but unknown.

Considering the turnover, there are several million people who, not having renewed their hunting authorisation, remain mere holders of the weapons they have acquired, and often, on their death, these weapons end up being held by their heirs, if not sold or scrapped.

The comparison of the collected data with this conservative estimate produces surprising results. The comparison of the ISTAT homicide rate in the Italian population and that of the population of arms holders (g…) illustrates how, among the [firearm licence] holders, the number of homicides is lower by about 20% with respect to the general population, so that it is more reliable than the average. It is evident, here more than ever, that the general system of control of the security of the owners must be considered in general effective and efficient, even if with the perspectives of improvement mentioned below, while it cannot be said that the availability of a firearm is a strong incentive to its use to commit crimes.

[ISTAT = Italian Institute of Statistics]

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