Australia

Yeah...

I am pro recreational target shooting, I think it's largely harmless and fun. So I am coming at this from a "owning a gun is a serious responsibility but one that should be allowed" angle and it's something that's shocked me ever since I did the training and registration.

I think a lot of things are about right, and we see this reflected in the very low levels of violence and particularly gun violence. I do think that some of the rules around mental health stuff just get people hiding problems for fear of losing their one social link/fun thing and that permit to aquire applications in the same calibre/activity should start getting more closely examined rather than less (currently the first is slow but future ones are a given). But the ammo thing is absolutely shockers.

Imo, we should be keeping logs of what we've fired/missfired attached to the events we go to and that should be in a central db that ammo shops see when selling to you. There will be some miscounting and there should be some understanding around that but it's not really onerous to go "well I walked in here with 200 round and out with 20". Sure people could still do fraud but it's about making it harder, preventing massive stockpiles, and usually when humans make up numbers it's extremely obvious when you do statistical analysis and if you look like that it's not ridiculous for the inspector to come round and say "ok mate, open the safe and lets see what's in there".