[bombcar]

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.

[rsynnott]

> In the USA you can just buy a black-powder cannon if you want

Is this... common? Can't imagine why anyone would want one.

[pavon]

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).

[bombcar]

It's not common and they're expensive, but it's possible and apparently fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtswMYlBd0

(It's probably $5k to $10k to get a working cannon, and most owners are probably reenactors and movie-proppers.)

[rsynnott]

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...)