Easier Access to Firearms? Before We Answer, Let’s Make Sure We Know What We’re Talking About

On 25 September, during the opening of a sports shooting range in Boguty-Pianki, President Karol Nawrocki said that Poland should begin a public discussion about “responsible access to firearms.” In the same speech, he pointed to something perhaps even more important than access itself: a firearm does not provide security on its own — what matters is the person who knows how to handle it responsibly. prezydent.pl

That combination of ideas alone should probably be enough to make us pause for a moment before the debate gathers momentum. Because “easier access to firearms” makes a perfect headline. It immediately creates two camps. One side sees an armed society, citizens better able to defend themselves and less bureaucracy. The other sees more handguns on the streets, arguments ending in gunfire and American-style scenarios transplanted into Poland. You do not even need to know the details of any proposal before deciding whether you are for it or against it.

Except that the President did not present a finished proposal for liberalising the law. He called for a discussion.

And if that is the case, perhaps — for once — it would be worth not starting that discussion with the answer already decided.

We Understand Cars. We Usually See Firearms Only When Something Has Gone Wrong

There is a particular problem with firearms that we rarely notice with other potentially dangerous objects. A car is a good example. Not because a car and a handgun are the same thing. Obviously, they are not. Their primary purposes are different, their uses are different, and no sensible legal framework can be built on a simplistic comparison between the two.

But it is worth looking at how we think about them.

In 2025, 1,660 people were killed on Polish roads and 24,590 were injured. There were almost 21,000 road accidents. It was the lowest number of road deaths in years, so there is good reason to talk about improving safety. Even so, on average, more than four people every day still did not make it home. Policja.pl

Yet after a fatal crash caused by a drunk driver, we do not normally begin by asking whether Poles should own fewer cars. We ask about the person. Why were they driving after drinking? Had they previously lost their licence? Why did they get behind the wheel again? Was the punishment too lenient? Could they have been stopped earlier? We respond in much the same way when someone drives at 150 km/h through a city or deliberately uses a vehicle as a weapon.

A car can kill, but we know cars from an entirely different part of life. We drive to the shops and to work. We pick up our children. We sit in traffic jams and argue over parking spaces. Millions of times, we see cars when absolutely nothing bad happens.

That is why, when tragedy does occur, it is relatively easy for us to separate the normal use of the tool from the person who used it irresponsibly.

For someone outside the shooting community, firearms are often experienced in exactly the opposite way.

They do not see a competitive shooter spending hours refining technique just to gain another point on the target. They do not see a collector who is more interested in the history of a mechanism than in firing it. They do not visit a gunsmith’s workshop, where the problem of the day may be a poorly interacting component, the installation of an optic or finding the right configuration. They do not watch an ordinary training session where, for most of the time, nothing particularly dramatic happens.

They see firearms when there is a war. When someone commits a robbery. When a murder takes place. Or in a film, where drawing a handgun usually means something bad is about to happen.

We first encounter cars as an ordinary part of everyday life and only later learn how dangerous they can be. Many people first encounter firearms as objects used to hurt others — and never get the chance to see them in any other context.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the two trigger completely different emotional reactions.

More Than a Million Firearms Is a Big Number. But What Does It Actually Tell Us?

This brings us to one of the more interesting aspects of the entire debate.

Firearms in Poland are no longer as marginal a phenomenon as they were only a decade or two ago. According to figures for the end of 2025, police records contained more than 1.037 million registered firearms, while the number of permits reached 411,769. In 2021, the number of registered firearms stood at around 658,000. In just four years, the total therefore increased by almost 380,000. MILMAG

The structure of newly issued permits is also more interesting than the stereotype might suggest. In 2025, the largest numbers were issued for collecting purposes — 21,071 — and sporting purposes — 17,601. Permits connected with personal protection were much further down the list, at 7,254. MILMAG

That does not fit particularly well with the image in which rising firearm ownership primarily means more and more people wanting to carry handguns for self-defence. A significant part of that growth is taking place in the worlds of sport shooting and collecting — areas that remain almost completely invisible to people with no contact with the shooting community.

There is another trap here as well. Permit statistics should not automatically be treated as the exact number of firearm owners. Poland’s Supreme Audit Office has pointed out that one person may hold more than one permit, meaning the number of individual firearm owners cannot be calculated precisely from permit statistics alone.

At the same time, in 2026 the Supreme Audit Office identified genuine weaknesses in the supervision system, including issues surrounding the continuous monitoring of whether firearm owners continue to meet medical and psychological requirements. Supreme Audit Office

And this is exactly why the firearms debate becomes much more interesting once we move beyond two simple slogans: “make access easier” or “ban it.”

More than one million legally registered firearms are not, in themselves, proof that the system works perfectly. Nor are they proof that increasing firearm ownership inevitably leads to disaster.

They demonstrate something simpler: firearm ownership already exists on a significant scale in Poland, while many Poles still know firearms primarily through popular culture and crime reporting.

It is a little like trying to understand road traffic by watching nothing but footage of car crashes.

Having a Permit Is One Thing. Knowing How to Handle a Firearm Is Another

In Karol Nawrocki’s remarks, perhaps more interesting than the proposal to begin the debate itself was his emphasis on being “trained” and “responsible.”

Because access to firearms and the ability to handle them properly are not the same thing.

The current Polish system certainly does not work on the basis that an adult can simply walk into a shop with an ID card and walk out carrying a handgun.

Polish law provides for different purposes of firearm ownership, and the process depends on the type of permit being sought. In the case of a sporting permit, the requirements include, among other things, membership of a shooting association, recognised sporting qualifications and a licence issued by the relevant sporting body. For collecting purposes, membership of an appropriate association is required.

As a rule, an applicant must also provide medical and psychological certificates, while the law includes testing of knowledge of the relevant regulations and the ability to handle firearms, subject to exemptions resulting from certain existing qualifications. Warsaw Metropolitan Police

Whether this is the best possible model is open to debate.

And this is precisely where the discussion starts to become genuinely interesting.

If safety is supposed to come from human competence, perhaps the question should not only be: “who should be allowed access?” but also: “what should we expect them to know?”

What matters more — demonstrating a legally recognised purpose for owning a particular firearm, or demonstrating genuine competence in handling it? How should that competence be measured? What role should training play? Should the system place greater emphasis on practical knowledge rather than simply multiplying formal requirements?

Interestingly, similar thinking has appeared in Polish legislative debate before. One earlier proposal suggested moving away from the current system of permits tied to a particular “purpose” and replacing it with levels of access based on the user’s demonstrated competence.

Something rather like driving licence categories.

The higher the proven level of competence, the broader the range of firearms available to the individual.

The proposal never became law, but the idea itself shows that the comparison with cars can be more than just a journalistic device.

This is not about copying road traffic law and applying it to firearms. It is about a principle we all understand intuitively: before someone independently operates a potentially dangerous piece of equipment, they should know what they are doing.

With cars, nobody finds that controversial.

With firearms, emotions tend to take over that part of the conversation remarkably quickly.

Knowing About Firearms Does Not Mean Encouraging People to Own Them

This may be one of the hardest stereotypes to break.

A person can live their entire life in Poland without owning a firearm, and most people probably will. There is no reason to convince everyone that they should buy a handgun, just as not everyone needs to ride a motorcycle, go diving or take up skydiving.

Knowing the rules, however, is something entirely different from wanting to own a firearm.

Within the shooting community, safety begins with things that may sound almost trivial. Controlling the direction of the muzzle. Treating every firearm as though it were loaded. Knowing your target and what lies beyond it. Keeping your finger off the trigger until you have made the decision to fire.

This is not the spectacular side of shooting.

In fact, quite the opposite. Good firearms training can look surprisingly boring from the outside, because its essence is repetition, control and the elimination of mistakes.

That is why the occasional claim that teaching a young person how to handle a firearm safely amounts to “getting them used to killing” sounds rather peculiar.

When we teach a child how to cross the road, we are not introducing them to fatal traffic accidents. We are teaching them that objects weighing well over a tonne move along the road beside them and that certain rules simply cannot be ignored.

You do not have to like cars to know that walking in front of a moving bus is a bad idea.

We can think about firearms in a similar way.

Respect is considerably more useful than taboo.

Especially when, with more than a million legally registered firearms in the country, the possibility that someone may encounter one at some point — at a shooting range, during service, at a friend’s home, within the family or during training — is no longer entirely abstract.

Knowing that a firearm should not be handled carelessly, understanding how to verify its condition and knowing why certain safety rules must never be broken does not turn someone into a firearms enthusiast.

Knowing how to use a fire extinguisher does not mean you are fascinated by fires.

There is also work to be done within the shooting community itself.

Someone who has been shooting for years can very quickly forget what this world looked like before their first visit to a range. Abbreviations, procedures and safety rules become obvious. Then someone from outside the community asks a question that sounds naïve to an experienced shooter and is told: “You don’t know anything about this, so don’t comment.”

It is difficult to imagine a more effective way of leaving that person with exactly the same assumptions they arrived with.

If the only images of firearms they have ever seen came from wars, films and crime reports, it is hardly surprising that they do not know the rest of this world.

And this is precisely where shooters, instructors, competitors, collectors, retailers, gunsmiths and clubs have practical experience that is often missing from the wider debate.

That does not mean they should be left to write the law for themselves.

It means that creating sensible rules in any field is difficult without listening to people who understand how that field works in practice.

At the same time, the experience of practitioners does not invalidate the concerns of people outside the shooting community.

“What happens if access becomes broader?” is a legitimate question.

So is the question of whether today’s control mechanisms are sufficient.

The Supreme Audit Office has shown that the current system contains areas requiring attention, which means reducing the entire discussion to “legal firearm owners are not the problem” would be just as convenient — and just as superficial. Supreme Audit Office

A good debate begins precisely where both sides stop pretending they already have all the answers.

So Perhaps We Should Not Begin With “More” or “Less”

The President’s remarks have provided a useful opportunity to discuss firearms more broadly than we usually do.

Not because we must support easier access.

And not because we should automatically assume that easier access represents a threat.

First, it is worth establishing what we are actually talking about.

Is the problem with the Polish system that there are too few firearms — or that too few people know how to handle them safely?

Should procedures primarily be designed to limit the number of firearm owners, or to distinguish more effectively between responsible people and those who should not be entrusted with firearms?

Do the current requirements genuinely test competence, or do some of them mainly test a person’s ability to navigate the procedure?

What should ongoing supervision look like once a permit has been issued?

And finally: how much of what we believe about firearms comes from data and experience — and how much comes from the image of firearms we have absorbed throughout our lives?

This is where the comparison with cars becomes useful again, even though it does not provide us with a ready-made answer.

We have learned to live with the knowledge that a car is both useful and potentially dangerous. We do not try to eliminate risk by pretending it does not exist. We create regulations, train drivers, improve roads, carry out sobriety checks, revoke licences, analyse accidents and change solutions that do not work.

Firearms deserve at least the same level of seriousness in public debate.

Without fascination, but without demonisation either.

Without assuming that every Pole should own one — and without assuming that someone who wants to own one legally becomes suspicious simply by expressing that wish.

The President used the phrase “responsible access.”

Perhaps the second word deserves a little more of our attention than the first.

Ultimately, we can argue about the number of documents required, the permit model, medical examinations, training requirements or the scope of individual permissions. We may conclude that some rules should be simplified, others left unchanged and still others tightened.

That is exactly where the real discussion belongs.

But perhaps we should enter that discussion only after we have taken the time to understand what we are actually debating.

Awareness, knowledge and constructive argument should be the entry ticket to any serious conversation about firearms.

Emotion will turn up uninvited anyway.