It takes a shooting spree to trigger action

The government has announced that it will be taking measures to increase gun control. Exactly what these measures will be is something that will be spelled out at a later date. The reports carried in the newspapers left out one essential piece of information, as did the communication from the government. How many registered guns are there on these islands? Rather than demanding this information from the government, or from the police force which is responsible for the registration, journalists end up referring to the number of members which the federation of hunting associations claims that it has.

The reasoning goes something like this: the regulations stipulate that a shotgun cannot be registered unless its owner is a member of a hunting association. This is because hunting is the only permissible reason for owning a gun. The federation of hunting associations claims it has 12,000 members. Therefore there must be 12,000 registered shotguns in Malta.

Why the speculation? Why the convoluted calculations? If guns are registered, then somewhere there must be a register of guns. Surely, somebody can bring out a calculator and tot them up. Or maybe there isn’t a gun register, after all?

Either way you look at it, 12,000 registered shotguns in a population of just over 400,000 – and that’s without reckoning the unlicensed guns – seem a little excessive. The hunting federation doesn’t think it excessive at all. It wishes to increase its membership, and to this end anyone who sends in a small donation is entitled to participate in a raffle, with a semi-automatic shotgun as a prize.