Italy Loosens Gun Laws as Matteo Salvini Polishes His Tough Guy Image

At a police convention in October, Matteo Salvini, the most powerful figure in Italy’s populist government, ran his hands over an enormous military-grade sniper rifle and posed with a submachine gun. Before elections this year, he campaigned at a gun show and signed a cooperation pledge with a group advocating looser gun laws in Italy.

“It’s tradition,” Mr. Salvini said of hunting and responsible gun ownership when he signed the pledge. “It’s culture.”

Italian culture, linked in the popular imagination with fine art, fashion and good food, does not typically conjure up the image of assault weapons. But in September, the government loosened gun laws, making it possible to own more guns like the AR-15, an assault rifle that has been used in numerous mass shootings in the United States, most recently a Pennsylvania synagogue where 11 were killed.

Opponents of Mr. Salvini wonder why he would want to import the freewheeling gun culture so associated with the United States, which is far and away the developed world’s leader in mass shootings and other gun-related violence. The easy answer seems to be politics.

As interior minister and deputy prime minister, Mr. Salvini is changing many things, working from a populist playbook. He has cracked down on immigration, declared a war on drugs and spread the sense of a public safety emergency, even though crime in Italy has been dropping for years.

Depending on whom you ask, Mr. Salvini is either making Italy safer or purposefully stoking fears at a time when voters across Europe are looking to strongmen.

Italy does not have a gun lobby anywhere near as powerful as the National Rifle Association in the United States. But Mr. Salvini is in the process of creating his own following as he promotes himself as a law and order tough guy.

The looser gun laws are only part of the picture as Mr. Salvini tethers immigration to security issues, even loading his “Security Decree,” passed Wednesday in the Italian Senate, with tough measures against migrants.

Among other things, the decree, he says, would make Italians safer by making it easier to deport migrants, severely restricting their pathways to legal status and closing centers focused on integration. The measure, which the lower house of Parliament will vote on later in the month, would also give Taser guns to more police.