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Comment by mikejb | Hacker News Reader

This is not correct. The details of gun ownership rights depends on the individual European state, but it's absolutely possible for a civilian to own guns. In fact, some do. It's just not engrained in the general culture or connected to the protection of rights, and subject to stricter regulation.

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Look, I didn’t say “all Europeans”.

And “stricter regulation” is literally “you need to prove you need a gun and that you are sane” in most of the cases.

"Prove you need it" isn't really an accurate summation of European gun laws, since as far as I'm aware they all allow ownership of firearms in cases where somebody wants a gun, rather than needs it. Who in Europe needs to hunt for substance, or needs to participate in marksmanship sports? These are recreational hobbies that the gun laws of all European nations I'm aware of accommodate.

I know many European gun laws are what would be described in the US as 'shall-issue', so it's not 'prove you need it' in all cases.

In the UK, which has some of the strictest laws, it's more like show you have a legitimate reason. Hunting is a common one, but self defense is not a legitimate reason. Apparently, working in maritime security in a piracy area lets you buy almost anything, even handguns and automatic weapons that are otherwise banned.

> In the UK, which has some of the strictest laws, it's more like show you have a legitimate reason.

This is not true for guns. The UK police are required, by law, to issue a gun certificate unless they have a specific reason not to. Rifles are different.

I really don't want to wade into this debate, but I'm really confused by how you are using "gun" and "rifle" here. "Rifle" us a strict subset of "gun" in my vocabulary.

A gun is a shotgun, a canon, something that fires shot or a shell, that kind of thing. A rifle has rifling and fires a bullet. It's technical, but we're talking about laws so the technicalities matter. In the UK a licence for a gun, such as a shotgun, is 'shall-issue' to use terminology the US is familiar with. They need a reason to deny - you don't need a reason to be approved.

For future reference, in the U.S. and Canada (and possibly elsewhere), gun also refers to rifles and handguns, not just smoothbore guns.

I find it incredibly amusing how everyone in this thread clearly had forgotten in the context of what I had made that comment in the first place.

Now - if you use a gun outside the hunting area or marksmanship competition, what do you think would happen to you?

I have started this thread because that's exactly what drone owners are currently doing. Trying to defend them because they "didn't know about non-static no-fly zones" is a good reason to take away their license to use the drones as opposed to saying that "people make mistakes".

In a lot of European countries self defence is enough of a reason to be granted a weapon license. The regulation is mostly about sanity, central databases and background and regular storage checks.

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