The idea of having gun permits is that people would need to comply to certain regulations to acquire such a permit. Let's say you require a gun safety course for instance. This means that there are an reduced risk that the gun owner will let the gun be stored somewhere kids can get access to it. By requiring firing training and accuracy requirement (needed for hunters here in Sweden) you minimize the risk of the gun owner hitting the wrong target. We also require our hunters to prove that they know what they can shoot with what type of weapon so we would not have wounded animals in our nature. The self defence reson to own weapons is a non issue here but we got lot's of hunters.