It's not like you can't own one at all down there, one of my dutch friends loves clay pigeon shooting for example. I am quite sure you people have similar laws to us?
if you mean similar to US, nope, not at all. We don't have a right to bear arms. You're right about sport shooting though. That's the one and only exception we have for a civilian to own a firearm (note that hunting wildlife is considered a sport). It's not a very popular sport though, and very strictly regulated. I believe it's not even allowed to take your gun home. You need to leave it in the locker at the gun club's shooting range, unless you have a very special permit (hunting license).
I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of Dutch people will never get to see a real gun in their entire life, except maybe a glimpse of a butt sticking from a cop's holster.
If I hadn't had a grandpa living in Belgium, who actually was a shooting club member and owned a Magnum with telescope sights (we ridiculed him for that for a looong time, that scope was the same size as the gun lol), I would personally not have seen a gun until I went to Berlin when I was 27, where the police patrolled the metro with drawn submachineguns for Labour Day.
EDIT: that being said, illegal firearm ownage has been rising ever since Schengen
EDIT2 : note that hunting licenses aren't permanent. They're only valid for a certain number of animals. There's strict quota on how much wildlife can be shot per year, and the number of hunting licences given out are directly correlated to that. To put it simple, if say, there's a quota to shoot 10 deer per year, and Jan gets a hunting licence for 5 deer, and Piet gets a hunting license for 5 deer, then that's it. No one else is getting a hunting license that year, and Jan and Piet's licences become invalid after their 5th kill.
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Topic: Do you own firearms? (Read 5534 times)