Why Italy has no school shootings despite owning 8.6 million guns

Italy has 8.6 million guns. But zero school shootings.

Not “few.” Not “less than other countries.” Zero. In over 12 years, that figure has not changed. No fire drills doubling as lockdowns. No text alerts to panicked parents. No backpacks searched for Glock-shaped silhouettes.

I didn’t come here for this realization. I moved to Italy in my early 40s, expecting better food, maybe slower mornings. I didn’t expect the calm that comes from raising a child in a place where school isn’t shadowed by the fear of bullets. But that calm is real. And it reveals something many Americans still struggle to admit: the mass shooting epidemic isn’t just about guns. It’s about systems. Rituals. And the stories countries tell themselves about what they deserve.

Italian kids don’t grow up in a vacuum. They watch American movies, play Call of Duty, and chase each other in playgrounds with plastic pistols. “Bang bang, sei morto!”—you’re dead—echoes just as often in Naples as in New York.

But cultural mimicry has its limits. In Italy, the props rarely become real. There's no casual normalization of keeping loaded firearms in the bedroom dresser. No tradition of grandpa handing down a rifle for “safekeeping.” The line between pretend and lethal doesn’t just exist—it’s reinforced by law, by process, by mindset. So yes, Italian kids are just as drawn to the drama of heroism and villains. What’s different is the system that surrounds them.

Italy has no Second Amendment. No constitutional doctrine proclaiming gun ownership as a divine right. And because of that absence, the conversation around firearms is less moral, more administrative.

You want a gun? Fine. Be over 18. Complete safety training. Pass a background check. Get certified by a doctor—your mental health matters here. Then register your weapon with the local police within 72 hours. No constitutional theatrics. No Facebook rants about freedom. Just paperwork.

It sounds simple, even boring. But that’s the point. In Italy, owning a gun is treated like owning a car: useful, regulated, and entirely unrelated to your self-worth. The gun doesn’t elevate your identity. It doesn’t signal masculinity, rebellion, or sovereignty. It just sits there, serving its purpose—mostly for hunting or sport.

What Italy understands—and America resists—is that systems work best when they add just enough friction. The kind that forces people to pause. Think. Prove. Wait. Here, that friction shows up everywhere. From police checks to license renewals, from mental health screenings to weapon registration. It’s not punitive. It’s preventive.

If you threaten someone—verbally, online, drunkenly in a bar—the police can and will show up. They’ll know what guns you have because every one is registered. And if you’ve shown signs of instability, they can ask you to hand them over. It’s not a theoretical process. It happens. Guns are surrendered, not confiscated. Stability is reassessed. And only after a clean bill of mental health can you get your weapons back.

Contrast that with the U.S., where red flag laws exist in name but rarely in effect. Where gun ownership is often invisible to local enforcement. Where threats slip through cracks wide enough to bury entire school districts.

Italy’s gun culture is real. Especially in rural regions, hunting is a tradition. But owning a gun doesn’t make you special here. It doesn’t guarantee you a podium at town hall. It doesn’t turn you into a martyr for liberty.

Instead, it wraps you in a system of expectations. The expectation that if your mental health falters, someone will intervene. That if you act out, your weapons will be paused—not politicized. That having a gun doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. It increases it. In America, the gun is often the centerpiece. In Italy, it’s just another item in the closet—important, perhaps, but not sacred.

This difference in framing extends far beyond firearms. Italy has what many would call an old-fashioned social contract. Imperfect? Absolutely. But still intact. National healthcare means fewer people fall through the cracks. If you need psychiatric help, you’re more likely to get it—without worrying about bankruptcy. If you're struggling with addiction, the state doesn’t shrug. It steps in. Quietly. Mechanically. Often slowly—but consistently.

That care infrastructure doesn’t eliminate crime or violence. But it does remove one layer of volatility. When survival isn’t constantly in question, people tend to snap less often. In the U.S., where healthcare is a profit-driven maze, mental health care remains a luxury or an afterthought. It’s possible—common even—for someone to deteriorate silently, visibly, and still have unfettered access to weapons. In Italy, that kind of decay sets off alarms. Not always loudly. But loud enough.

Italy is not immune to violence. Organized crime persists. Mafia dynamics still shape parts of the economy. Black markets exist. But these aren’t the kinds of crises that bleed into classrooms or playgrounds. The idea of a teenager—or even an adult—entering a school with an AR-15 simply does not compute.

And it’s not because Italians are morally superior or emotionally more stable. It’s because access is different. Systems interrupt more. Culture reinforces caution instead of glorifying escalation. Where the U.S. sees guns as a mechanism of control—of others, of fear, of freedom—Italy treats them as a mechanism of obligation. Use it responsibly, or lose it entirely.

In the U.S., school shootings have become ritualized. We know the steps before they happen.

Step 1: Breaking news alert.
Step 2: Thoughts and prayers.
Step 3: Victim names scroll across the screen.
Step 4: Political stalemate resumes.
Step 5: Parents send their kids back to school, pretending it's normal.

The machinery of grief keeps running—even when the outrage has gone stale. Even when the solutions are obvious. Even when other countries, like Italy, offer a working blueprint for prevention.

That’s the cruelty of it. Not just the violence—but the familiarity of it. In Italy, the absence of such rituals feels jarring. Not because they don’t care about violence. But because they haven’t normalized it into background noise.

No one in Italy is walking around boasting about gun safety. There’s no smugness. No viral TikToks about how “we do it better.” That’s not the vibe. The lesson is quieter.

It lives in the parents who don’t panic when the school bus is late. In the kids who learn math without practicing shooter drills. In the silence that follows the news cycle—because there’s nothing to report. Italy didn’t get lucky. It built something. Slowly. Annoyingly. Bureaucratically. But with just enough care to keep certain nightmares at bay.

Italy is not immune to tragedy. All it takes is one bad day, one loophole, one failure in the system. But that possibility hasn’t led to paralysis. It’s led to process.

The rules are strict for a reason. The rituals are enforced for a reason. The friction is preserved for a reason. Not because Italians are blindly obedient. But because enough of them agreed—consciously or not—that safety is more important than speed. That access should never outpace responsibility. That the fear of overreach is nothing compared to the grief of underreaction.

So why does Italy have guns but no school shootings?

Because it doesn’t let its cultural identity be held hostage by hardware. Because it doesn’t see firearms as a shortcut to meaning. Because it’s willing to inconvenience individuals in order to protect communities. Because it wraps risk in red tape, and isn’t ashamed of doing so. Because, ultimately, it treats violence like a preventable system failure—not an inevitable feature of freedom.

In America, freedom is often framed as subtraction—what the government can’t take from you. In Italy, freedom is a little more layered. It’s access wrapped in accountability. Choice buffered by care. Power restrained by process.

It’s far from perfect. But it works in this domain. Because here, a gun is not a metaphor. It’s a machine. And machines, when regulated properly, don’t define the culture—they reflect it. That’s why the kids still play. That’s why the schools stay quiet. That’s why the headlines read differently. Not because Italy has no guns. But because it never built a culture that worshipped them.