People vastly underestimate the number of privately held firearms in Europe, and how “easy” it is to obtain one.
It’s not an insurmountable obstacle, and depending on the country can range from “California difficulty” to “basically an NFA stamp” but they’re out there.
Often they are not “the scary black rifle” type, but they’re still firearms.
This is very country-dependent; in some they're actually quite common, in some they're extremely heavily restricted. In Ireland, say, you will require a legitimate reason to have one (essentially the only legitimate reasons are sports shooting, hunting, and certain farming activities), training, secure storage inspected and signed off on by the police, and permission from the police. In practice, it's so onerous that most people doing sports shooting would use a gun owned by the club. Automatic rifles are completely illegal to own, as are nearly all pistols (except for use by the military and by specialist police; ordinary police don't have firearms). Tasers etc are also effectively illegal to own (there being no legitimate sports/hunting/farming applications).
Oddly, crossbows are also restricted, though may be licensed as above; as I understand it this is due to a legislative error which no-one has gotten around to fixing.
Exactly - gun laws are way more complicated than people assume - some countries on paper will be identical to Ireland but basically anyone can say "hunting" and the police don't do much more than just sign off on it.
And in other countries, they make no distinction between a black-powder blunderbuss and fully automatic military weapons - they're both equally hard to obtain, so the people who do get a gun end up with a select-fire rifle.
Pistols are often more heavily regulated than rifles, because they're concealable.
In the USA you can just buy a black-powder cannon if you want. Artillery not so much if it is autoloading. The "own a musket for home defense" copy pasta comes to mind.
I've known a few people into black powder guns and cannons. It is a fun hobby for them. One of them got into it by way of model rocketry, the rest were folks who were generally into "mountain man" era skills, technology and reenactment (for history and fun, not prepper illusions).
There was also a tradition at our high school to shoot off a cannon each time our football team scored a point at home games (just the powder no projectile).
I'm now curious if one could license one here. It doesn't _obviously_ fall into any of the categories that would make it prohibited (as opposed to merely restricted), and it's not like it'd be very useful for criminal purposes, but it might be hard to sell the gardai on the idea that it was essential for farming. (Surely at some point there's been a sport that involves cannon, tho...)
It’s not an insurmountable obstacle, and depending on the country can range from “California difficulty” to “basically an NFA stamp” but they’re out there.
Often they are not “the scary black rifle” type, but they’re still firearms.
Then again, in the USA you can buy a Gatling gun and you rarely hear issues around that - https://youtu.be/9U8850jgTwk?si=5UTz7HsgaLxgbFuS