Bolsonaro expands gun access in Brazil

topic:	Political violence
located:	Brazil
editor:	Ellen Nemitz

When Jair Bolsonaro ran for the president in 2018, one of his trademarks - a gun hand-gesture - symbolically gathered his followers around the promise of making firearms easier to buy.

Like many other far-right politicians, Bolsonaro, who is a former military man, maintains that the public has the right to own firearms - allegedly to guarantee self-defense, although it’s known that having a gun at home could bring about more risks than security.

Bolsonaro’s push to make it easier for a citizen to own weapons started in 2019, when the first decrees were issued, allowing gun ownership for professionals such as lawyers, politicians and even some journalists. Additionally, the categories and amounts of ammunition authorised for private purchasing were widened.

Since then, dozens of normative acts were used, according to the Igarapé Institute, to broaden gun access, with a special emphasis on hunting, collecting and sport shooting.

Two years later, Bolsonaro’s plan seems to be ongoing. On 12 February, Jair Bolsonaro signed a series of new decrees which strengthen even further his firearm policies and change the Disarmament Statute, already seriously dismantled.

The result is that, within two years, the number of legal guns registered rose by 65 percent, from 697,000 to 1.15 million, according to a study made in partnership between the newspaper O Globo and the institutes Igarapé and Sou da Paz.

Meanwhile, intentional violent murders had increased by 5 percent in 2020, compared to the previous year. Considering that the majority of victims are black (close to 75 percent), the structural racism that kills more black than white people could be worsened, as points out Gabriel Sampaio, coordinator of Program to Combat Institutional Violence of Conectas Human Rights, in an interview to the newspaper Nexo.

In an interview for Vice, Thiago Amparo, a human rights professor at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas Law School in São Paulo, pondered that the desire for carrying guns does not represent the entire population (more than two-thirds of people are against gun ownership, according to a data survey mentioned by the article). “Bolsonaro's vision speaks much more to the lobby of the firearms industry, to which he is aligned, than to an expression of popular will,” Amparo said.

Although the president has tweeted that the population would be celebrating the decisions, this is not the opinion of many specialists, who are deeply concerned about the risks of putting more guns into the hands of the public.

The Igarapé Institute, for instance, has already declared that it will appeal to the Supreme Court in an attempt to block the new rulings, as well as support the defense against the tax cuts to firearm importation - an issue already under Supreme Court’s evaluation.

“Amid the peak of pandemic deaths, on the same day that the worrying data on the increase in the number of homicides in the country in 2020 were published, the federal government decides that it is a priority to continue with the dismantling of Brazil’s already troubled weapons and ammunition control policy,” reads the note from the Igarapé Institute. “This not only has lethal effects on the country that kills the most with firearms in the world, but also reinforces possible threats to democracy and the security of the collective.”

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