ABSTRACT: Highlights of the referendum to abolish fire-arms licenses and, consequently, hunting with rifles.

(NOTIZIE RADICALI, January 3, 1981)

Hunting with rifles requires a fire-arms license. If the latter is abolished hunting is automatically suppressed.

THE NORMS TO BE ABROGATED

It is proposed to abrogate from the Public Security consolidation act approved by royal decree on June 18, 1931, no.773, the third paragraph of art. 42, concerning the issuing of licenses to bear arms by police officials or prefects.

MAIN POINTS ON LICENSES TO BEAR ARMS

There are about three hundred private police services operating in Italy with between sixty and ninety thousand men - a standing army superior to the police (68,000), the Carabinieri (73,000) and the Financial Police (40,000).

They are estimated to make net earnings of at least 500 billion lire. The "vigilantes" usually protect private property, but they have been known occasionally to keep guard over public offices, for example the large pension computer.

In 1971 there were 68,000 licenses to bear arms for personal protection in circulation; 87,000 in 1973; 148,000 in 1976; 176,000 in 1977; over 200,000 in 1979. Presently there are estimated to be over 300,000. The race continues... Obviously these figures do not include citizens who keep arms in their homes (which only need be registered with the police authorities). To these must be added the fire-arms licenses for the purpose of hunting which total about 1,900,000 (in 1976 these were about 1,500,000: here too the increase has been growing very rapidly).

The issuing of licenses to bear arms is a highly routine procedure despite the fact that those who request one must state their reasons for needing to move about bearing arms. The license costs only about 20,000 lire a year.

A person with a license is allowed to keep up to two pistols and six rifles (for hunting pistols are not permitted); but these limits can easily be evaded with requests to collect fire-arms which allows people to keep veritable arsenals.

Sixty thousand people work in the arms field; 416,000 short arms were produced last year in the Brescia factories alone.

There is no law establishing the bearing of arms by ordinary policemen who therefore ought to be disarmed except in particular cases. They will regain their full faculties as "guardians" of the cities, neighbourhoods, towns, among the citizens in the midst of their needs.

REFERENDUM FOR THE ABOLITION OF LICENSES TO BEAR ARMS AND OF HUNTING WITH FIRE-ARMS

Today the bearing of arms is prohibited by article 4 of law 18-6-1975, no.110, with the exception of authorisations foreseen in the old consolidated act of the public safety laws (paragraph 3 of art. 42 of the royal decree 18-6-1931, no.773). The abolition of that norm which is the goal of the referendum, therefore involves the absolute prohibition of bearing arms outside one's own home.

An immediate clarification is necessary with regard to this. If the referendum should be approved by popular vote, it would not mean the disarming of military units nor even of the police. The police forces, in fact, are authorised - without the need of a license - to bear the arms which are part of the equipment necessary for them to perform the functions of their service. But their members would not be allowed to carry other arms, above all the so-called "second arms" whose use has given rise to large questions on the occasion of clashes between demonstrators and the police forces. Ordinary policemen would also be disarmed.

Another consequence of abrogating authorisation to bear arms would be the disarming of private police services, the manifold squads of "vigilantes" that patrol our cities. And this would be a truly far-reaching result. The defence of public order - it is always necessary to remember the terms of the problem - inevitably ends by interfering with the substance and exercising of the citizens' fundamental rights, rights which are constitutionally guaranteed. It is a matter of extremely dangerous limitations. And so it is truly indispensable that public order should be entirely managed under the full and complete responsibility of authorities who are politically answerable to the Parliament and the voters.

The common citizen who feels more secure when he goes around armed is in reality labouring under a dangerous delusion: the moment in which he tries to defend himself he will already have been the victim of an aggressor who will have taken the initiative and have had a relative advantage along with being cold, cynical and professional. Unless he runs into a common chicken thief, and in that case he will be up against the rigours of the law which will punish him for an excess of legitimate self-defence.

Self-defence is an essential feature of the philosophy of violence and it precisely this tendency to validate it as a principle of civil coexistence that one must firmly fight.

But beyond these considerations - and they are not of secondary importance - the battle for the abolition of gun licenses touches the fundamental principles of civil coexistence, above all in consideration of the de facto situation in our country which today is overflowing with arms. The general indifference to the reality of the very widespread possession of every kind of weapon is truly one of the inexplicable and irrational aspects of social behaviour. The possession of arms, direct instruments of offence and death, does not figure among the reasons for social alarm which are wide-spread among the public and some of which certainly ought to be put into a new perspective.

And perhaps only a collective national debate might generate that general awareness of the incompatibility between the principles of a democratic society and the tendency to the use of arms: the philosophy of democracy is a philosophy of non-violence, a philosophy of reason, a philosophy of tolerance which in its practical application, as the corner-stone of the regulations of co-existence, leads to the exclusion of harmful and death-dealing instruments.

Hunting - This is completely involved in the referendum on gun licenses. Certainly if this referendum is passed, hunting will not be totally abolished, but it will be in practice since for centuries one has hunted with a rifle. And to carry a rifle one must have that arms license, that authorisation conceded by art. 42, paragraph 3, of the public order law which the referendum intends to abolish. Even the Constitutional Court has confirmed it (the referendum intends to abolish gun licenses, which is to say the permission to bear arms, excluding and "reducing to nought the reason for which the license can be granted: for personal defence and also for hunting". All those who want to abolish hunting must therefore vote "yes" to this referendum).

MAIN POINTS ON HUNTING

In some countries hunting is already prohibited (the Ivory Coast, Kenya, Somalia, the Canton of Geneva). The slaughter must be stopped in Italy too where every year more than two million "shooters", more than "hunters", destroy something like 200 million head of wildlife, including rare species such as the Appeninne Mountain Roe, the Chamois of the Abruzzi, while hunting is actually allowed in the national park of the latter region, and even little song birds are preyed upon such as blackbirds, finches and chaffinches, nor are widgeons or pipits spared... Bird hunting is practised by about 400,000 people.

Hunting today is mainly a consumerist mania which creates (and is created by) a business volume of two or three billion [lire] a year (arms and munitions merchants; costumes and accessories).

Surveillance, the key to any attempt at regulation (and the hunters count on this) is in fact non-existent; the game wardens are few and their activities limited by political patronage; their ornithological education is slender (imagine that of the hunters!). Effective controls, which will be more than just regulations on paper, are an extremely remote prospect.

Repopulation (another good idea of the hunters) requires permission from the owners of the land (which the hunters do not need), does not involve migratory species, and is often carried out with species imported from abroad which do not adapt well to a different location, are genetically different from our native species, and may be carriers of disease. To save the animals used for repopulation, which have lost the traits of the free and wild examples of the species, their predators are killed.

The true arbiters of hunting are the hunting associations with their powerful political and election ties, while politicians and parties neglect the 65% of the voters who are for the complete abolition of hunting (in as far as they are not organised).

Antonio Cederna wrote in the »Corriere della Sera on February 22, 1979: Incompetence, frivolity and ferocity regulate the practise of hunting in our country. "One shoots from the car, from the hotel window, the side of the road, boats along the coast. One shoots first and then decides: if it is a man who has been killed one runs away; if it is a protected bird species one gives it to the dog or lets it die; if it is beautiful one has it embalmed".

Finally, hunting feeds the arms market which makes our country into one of the biggest exporters of deadly tools, of arms for war, produced by the same factories as those for hunting which thus support the total volume of business.

And the defensive logic of the hunting associations is not to be understood, which at the same time maintains: 1) that wild animals are disappearing not because of hunting but because of pesticides and fungicides in agriculture, industrial pollution of water, etc.; 2) that without hunting the species would multiply so greatly as to seriously compromise our agriculture. Either one or the other, please!