Il Interior Ministry has disseminated the data relating to the licenses that are issued in Italy as regards the legal possession of weapons. In July 2018, therefore a few months ago, the documents were more than 1,3 million. This is a total of 1315700 licenses, 4% more than what was recorded during the 2015. The growth was mainly driven by sports use, given that in the last three years there has been an impressive + 27%: on the contrary, other licenses were down.
The firearms license has lost nine percentage points, mainly due to increasingly restrictive hunting regulations. The same goes for personal defense, first of all for what concerns the long guns. Giorgio Beretta, analyst of the Observatory OPAL (acronym that identifies the Permanent Observatory on Light Weapons), he commented on the numbers just pitted.
Here's what he said: “Many elders today they no longer hunt, but they still have rifles and decide to switch to the skeet shooting license, perhaps to go to the range at the weekend. Sport use is the easiest to get. In the 70s the owners of a rifle with gun license for hunting use they were about 2 million and 300 thousand, compared to about 700 thousand in the current period ".