| Slightly off-topic and two days late to the conversation but: every single country in the world(1) restricts private ownership of guns, it's not a useful metric when talking about gun ownership. In England and Wales guns are heavily restricted but aren't outright banned or extremely difficult to obtain. Effectively every adult that isn't disqualified from owning a gun (medical reasons, >3 years in prison, etc) should be able to obtain a smoothbore shotgun licence provided the security/storage requirements can be met, this may be very difficult for younger people living in shared accommodation or in very developed city centres but still. Once a shotgun licence is obtained you can effectively own as many shotguns as you can securely store. The firearms licence in comparison is much harder to obtain, you need to demonstrate a legitimate reason to own each specific firearm (i.e., land you have permission to hunt on, sports shooting at a club), the local police issuing the licence have a lot more say on whether they issue licences or allow amendments to the licences (i.e., owning more firearms), etc, but it's in principle not much different to a shotgun licence and if you already hold a shotgun licence you very likely can obtain a firearms licence for a very limited number of firearms. In American terminology a shotgun licence is shall-issue where a firearms licence (and amendments) are may-issue. When it comes to stats on whether a licence is granted(2), in 2019 98% of shotgun licences that were applied for were issued and 97% of firearms licences that were applied for were issued. This is a very different story to guns being outright banned or extremely difficult to obtain, gun ownership in the UK is low partially because of these restrictions but also because there's no gun culture to speak of. In comparison to countries like Iran, China, Japan, much of Asia and Africa, etc, we're extremely liberal with gun ownership, private gun ownership in Japan is almost unheard of and it's effectively prohibited for the general population for example. These things have to be taken into account when talking about whether a country restricts/bans guns, because otherwise there's only a handful of countries that have no restrictions on guns. Gun ownership may not be trivial in the countries you've lived in but it's at least legal for the general population. (1) We can get into the semantics of how restricted guns are in the USA and how this changes between cities/counties/states but as private sale/transfer of guns are effectively unrestricted and the right to gun ownership is constitutionally protected we can say that the USA (and Yemen, arguably South Sudan and Greenland as well) may as well not restrict private gun ownership (2) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... |