The murder of four women, shot in a bar in Rome, highlights the permissiveness of the legislation on wearing weapons.
by Olivier Bonnel (Rome , correspondence)
It is a common co -ownership meeting that turned to drama. Sunday, December 11, a man burst into a Fidene bar, a district northeast of Rome, killing four women. The murderer, Claudio Campiti, 57, told the police to have acts by accusing the trustee of acting “as mafia”. On his blog, he had confided to live without water and electricity due to unpaid invoices.
This drama could only have blacken the page of the news from Italian newspapers if it did not raise the sensitive issue of firearms in the Italian peninsula. Because Campiti’s weapon, a 45 glocked pistol, was stolen from a Roman shooting club, without it being reported. Furthermore, the first investigations in the killer’s past revealed that the weapon port permit was withdrawn in 2018.
The possession of handguns among the Italians is a real gray area, made of legal vacuum and lack of political will. “If we stop at the question of why a person was able to get a weapon from a shooting club, we miss the problem, says Giorgio Beretta, member of the Opal, the observatory on Light weapons and defense policies of Brescia (North). The real problem is in the lack of transparency and monitoring of controls, no standard in Italy requires adequate checks. “
The legislation is, in fact, surprisingly permissive. In 2022, in Italy, any citizen who does not suffer from mental problems or addiction to drugs or alcohol can obtain a weapon port permit. Only a self -certification is enough, countersigned by a attending physician, which leaves obvious flaws, underlines Mr. Beretta. The renewal of licenses, every five years, is done almost without any psychiatric expertise or advanced medical control. Another aberration for the researcher: the absence of anti-thefts on the weapons of the shooting stands, when the bottles of alcohol in supermarkets are, for example, endowed.
“To do justice Even
According to Giorgio Beretta, author of the book Il Paese Delle Armi (“Le Pays des Arms”, (Altreconomia, not translated), 3 to 4 million light weapons circulate in Italy. An arsenal used at Personal defense ends, for hunting or shooting in a sports club. The Ministry of the Interior remains silent on the number of weapons recorded in Italy. “We have no data on the number of weapons licenses. We do not know how many weapons are among Italians. But above all, nothing is known about the numbers of homicides or attempted homicides committed by means of legal weapons, “continues Giorgio Beretta.
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