“Almost 60,000 people were murdered in Brazil in 2014, most with guns,” npr.org reports. “While some Latin American countries have higher per capita murder rates, in absolute numbers, Brazil is the deadliest place in the world outside Syria. Brazilians are far more likely to be shot to death than Americans, a more populous country where there are about 8,000 to 9,000 gun homicides each year. Still, a group of Brazilian congressmen wants to make guns easier to obtain, modeling their proposal on U.S. legislation.” Still? What’s Portuguese for oy vey? Anyway . . .
Congressman Edson Moreira wants to make it easier to get guns . . .
“Brazil doesn’t have a gun problem. It has a problem of illegal guns in the hands of criminals, especially drug traffickers,” he says.
His group is trying to relax the ability of the police to decide who gets a weapon. “The idea is to return to the public the right to own a gun or not,” he says.
His argument is one familiar to Americans: If the “bad guys” have guns, the “good guys” should be allowed to have them as well to protect themselves.
Indeed, Moreira says he is inspired by America’s gun laws.
“The U.S.A. has the perfect legislation in the Second Amendment, which guarantees the population the right to bear arms,” he says.
Ain’t that the truth. One thing it isn’t: breaking news. Brazilians have been trying to roll back their restrictive gun control laws since 2003, when Brazil enacted the Disarmament Statue, preventing civilians from carrying guns in public and making firearms permits virtually unobtainable.
Initially firearm-related deaths fell, from nearly 40k in 2003 to just over 34k in 2004. Then, as noted above, they didn’t. npr.org somehow forgot to give the raw numbers. In 2014, Brazil was home to some 60k firearms-related homicides. That’s 116 murders per day. The country now accounts for 10 percent of all the world’s recorded firearms-related homicides.
With lobbying help from the NRA, Brazil held a national referendum in 2015 to restore gun rights. It passed. And then was ignored. wikipedia.org:
Brazilian Department of Justice (Ministério da Justiça), at the time it performs each individual’s mandatory background check (what is made prior every gun acquisition, and every three years after it’s acquired, whats allows gun confiscation), have been forbidding almost every citizens to buy guns, based on the Executive Order # 5.123, of 07/01/2004, that allows Brazilian FBI (Polícia Federal) to analize the reasons that motivate a gun acquisition and the will of keeping an acquired gun, in which it’s not considered a valid argument “self defense” because, according to them, there are allegedly sufficient and efficient public polices that are in charge of nationwide security, among other reasons of this kind of denial.
Despite talk of an individual right to bear arms, if the latest legislation passes it will only represent an incremental move towards restoring Brazilians’ gun rights. For example, ammunition purchases by newly enabled gun owners would be limited to 50 rounds per month. Still . . . [h/t misterO]
Maybe Shannon et al should head to brazil and preach their word there, para los ninos
… para as crianças.
* Brazilians speaks portuguese
Minha culpa
I’m going to skip this summer Olympics, if you don’t mind…
How many is a Brazilion?
I know what a Brazilian looks like, but I don’t think it would be work safe for me to post a pic here….
I’m pretty sure it’s zero
Sounds like Chicago.
Its almost 2 (1.7) Chicagos, scaled up to the size of a Country. If Brazil was a Chicago with 200 million people there would only be 31,700 homicides by firearm per year.
Wow, that really puts it in perspective.
Just down there a couple of weeks ago.
Was surprised to find out there is no hunting in Brazil. While I realize our 2nd amendment has nothing to do with hunting, it does affect the overall perception of guns.
Everyone I met was super nice and we did not see any violence. It was sad to see the amount of razor wire around most dwellings. Even the malls are hard to get into as they limit access with fences and wire.
In general there are no “small towns” like we have in the US. One of my associates told me that if there were any small (3-10000) towns, they would be gone in 10 years.
When someone says “small” town in Brazil – it means 30-40k people at least and usually many more.
They’ve got a long row-to-hoe, I wish them well. Getting rid of their current president and all her cronies would be a good start.
“Everyone I met was super nice and we did not see any violence. It was sad to see the amount of razor wire around most dwellings. Even the malls are hard to get into as they limit access with fences and wire.” Future of America unless strict immigration control is implemented, I’m afraid.
My ancestors came here legally — mostly to get away from the type of people who stayed behind — and are coming here now by the hundreds of thousands.
Hunting is restricted to european wild boar and runaway wild pigs. We even have the JAVAPORCO, an hybrid of wild boar and domesticated pigs.
A statue is something birds crap on (so maybe it was intentional misspelling). A STATUTE pertains to laws. Of course, I do believe anything that makes it harder for good guys to tool up should be crapped on.
I dunno, the guy may have the right idea. A lot of badly needed reasonable and sensible statues should be crapped on.
Somewhere in these two comments lurks a tasteless joke about Rio’s Christ The Redeemer.
“While some Latin American countries have higher per capita murder rates, in absolute numbers, Brazil is the deadliest place in the world outside Syria.”
Ironically, mass immigration is turning the US into Brazil by dumping all the people not wanted in Africa and Latin America into our country.
NRA is impressive though. The Marxists may be destroying our culture and eroding our freedoms, but NRA is making gains everywhere. If only we had an NRA org for the other 9 amendments (and another for white people) we might save America.
The NRA is making solid gains, but not everywhere. Some of us have been going backwards for the last 3 years, unfortunately. And Scalia’s passing pretty much guarantees we won’t see that reversed in a hurry.
Brazilians need to fight their own battles-literally. Dominated by a minor Iberian country through sheer brutality. And it ain’t much better many years later. At least the beaches are nice and the women are fine…
I dont live in Brazil. Gun rights restoration in the U.S. repeal the Latunberg act
Technically, Brazilians have gun rights but they are completely infringed.
The NPR story is lie. Guns are banned in Brazil so there are no murders with guns.
Gotta be a lie, because banning guns turns countries with high murder rates into socialist utopias. Sarc/
Brazil, isn’t that a movie about authoritarians and inept bureaucracy?
The liberal’s charming role model utopia known as Venezuela is actually much worse per capita wise. The murders in Venezuela are approaching 1:1000. 90 per 100,000 in 2015, although not all by firearm
Well, duh. Brazil’s murder rate is 4-5 times the US national average, even though they have stricter gun comtrol.
But hey, Jamaica’s murder rate is 12 times the US national average and they esentially banned guns in 1967.
All those who burn one for the Bern (about 90% of his supporters, I reckon. The rest are older than he is, and don’t have the lungs to inhale anything besides socialist nonsense), will just BSOD at that last statistic. Peaceful, blunt smoking, reggae drumming Rastafarians in a gun free utopia, and all….
This might get you going, if you can sit though it without convulsing over the numbers and stats that are tossed out:
Shannon Watts: Gun Safety Is a Winning Issue
More fun facts: the gangs in the favelas get guns in various ways. They steal them, they bribe corrupt police to loot police armories for them, they even make them. There’s a back alley industry churning out crappy subguns with smoothbore barrels. There’s nothing remotely like accuracy, but you don’t need that to pull up on a dirt bike ten feet from the target and spray a cloud of bullets. A simple metal tube for a barrel will work just fine for that.
I was considering taking a sharp turn and moving to Argentina but the gun laws are keeping me away. I hope they and Brazil can get their act together.
A small correction:
the referendum was in 2005, not 2015.
Bu bu bu bu everyone keeps saying this stuff only happens in America!
“Illegal guns in the hands of …drug trafficker.”
Kinda makes you think that a gun ban in the US would be as effective as our drug ban.
I’ve been in Brazil for almost two years now. You can own a gun, but it is a time consuming and cumbersome process that may or may not result in you getting a permit. You are also very limited in the kinds of guns you can own too. For instance, 9mm is strictly regulated as a police/military category, but .38 is not, neither is .45. There’s more obviously but I did want to point out that a private citizen can own a pistol or non-repeating rifle (bolt-action). Still, a .38 wheel gun is better than no gun at all. Forget about getting a permit to carry though.
That being said, the country is awash with guns and criminals here will shoot you for your iPhone and never even think about it. They have about a 5% solve rate for murders in Brazil. So why not? Brazil has 21 cities in the 50 most dangerous cities list – 4 in the top 10. This is a country where truly, only criminals have guns.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-50-most-violent-cities-in-the-world-2015-1
Brazil the former slave state that has no gun rights. But america also a former slave state has guns rights for all. An exceptional nation indeed.
No gun rights in places like new York. I moved from NYC to Texas because I refuse to be a victim.
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