La Regional Federcaccia of Tuscany provided some useful information on the correct possession of weapons. Self-defense, sport shooting or hunting: the regulatory evolution in this area is having a negative trend and diligence as regards custody is a terrain that the hunting association considers very slippery. Future predictions do not give hope for anything good, indeed there should be new restrictions and an increase in bureaucracy. Some positive news, however, has come from a series of judgments. The Court of Florence, for example, acquitted two defendants of the alleged offenses, since one of the two did not use the necessary diligence. Rifles, carbines and over-and-under guns were regularly reported, but they had been kept in an open compartment of the house, accessible to all.
The man used to keep his weapons inside a special wall gun, of traditional manufacture, open on the front. Inside of each rifle was secured to the other and to the structure by means of a chain closed with a special padlock. This is a method of conservation that respects the criteria of diligence dictated by the criminal law. It is clear, in fact, that anyone who wanted to take possession of one of the guns would have had to preventively open the padlock after removing the key or after breaking into it. We cannot therefore speak of a lack of diligence, as it is evident that the person in question had adopted adequate precautions, aimed at avoiding the possession of his own weapons.
The assertion of the agents that these rifles should have been stored inside an armored cabinet anchored to the wall does not hold up: no rule, in fact, prescribes such a precaution for the non-professional gun holder. The circumstance, then, that at the moment of the check the rifle box was open and one of the rifles was resting on the ground, does not change the substance of things. In the present case, the rifle is not found in another municipality, or at least in a different fraction or locality of the same, but simply inside a locked room, for use as a cellar or an evacuation room, adjacent to the accused's home as a pertinence and from the conduit itself for rent, like the home itself, through a single lease.
For all these crimes charged to the two hunters, which had produced, among other things, effects such as the denunciation and seizure of the weapons held, finally, there was the full acquittal of the crimes ascribed by the Court of Florence as the fact does not exist, thus also providing for the release from seizure and the return of the weapons to those entitled to them.