My brother-in-law lives next door and has one; he had to take a safety and shooting class to get a license and has to store it unloaded, either locked up or with at least one vital part removed. The police CAN inspect the storage at any time to ensure he complies with that last part, but I don't think it happens very often (it's never happened to him). He also recently told me a story about a couple national guardsmen who, after a training exercise, stopped by the store where he worked to pick some stuff up, completely forgetting they still had their combat rifles over their shoulders; police were called but once the situation was clarified there was no further incident (though that might not be the case NOW... ). If you read Breiviks pre-massacre posts one of the things that he notes is that he (previously) had no police record and had owned guns as a licensed hunter for many years, so getting access to (additional) firearms would be no difficulty. Of course, a fully operational fully automatic rifle is just as illegal for private citizens as it is in the US and, once again, I'm sure the authorities have made quite vigorous inquires into how he got it.

As for the police, my understanding is that they keep them at the station, but don't issue them except until/unless they have a situation clearly requiring it. As Camilla (and the press here) have noted, the problem in this case, in addition to the fact Utøya is an island (in fact I believe the name literally translates "out island" ), is that he deliberately set off the downtown bomb first as a diversion, so that all the cops who would normally respond with weapons were down there making sure the prime minister was OK and searching for the additional bombs suspected to be present (recall that at least one additional suspicious package was found there, probably a decoy). In order to get someone to deal with him they had to be notified he was on the island, redeploy armed cops from downtown (one paper noted that's where the SWAT team naturally was), then get a boat to transport them to the island. That it ONLY took an hour and a half in the wake of a bomb at the PMs office is actually rather remarkable.