Former President Lula da Silva said today that he wants to resume disarming the population if he wins the presidential election, in a country that has seen an exponential increase in gun purchases over the past four years.
During his meeting with the governors, held in a São Paulo hotel, Lula also proposed the recreation of the Ministry of Public Security, the creation of a University specialized in this area, the unification of the Public Security system, and the promotion of cooperation among neighboring countries to combat drug trafficking and arms smuggling.
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The former trade unionist also gave a nod to public security forces, one of Bolsonaro’s main electoral bases in 2018, and proposed strengthening the Federal Police, during an interview hours earlier with a local radio station in Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas.
Lula, favorite in the polls for the October presidential elections, discussed with a group of governors some of the main lines of his public security policy and stressed that if he returns to the presidency, he will “take back” the Statute of Disarmament.
The statute, passed in 2003, during the first year of his term (2003-2010), was approved in a popular plebiscite in 2005, which rejected a ban on the sale of weapons in the country, but restricted their carrying, while encouraging the disarmament of the civilian population.
However, the statute has been relaxed in recent years by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who had, in 2018 during his first presidential campaign, liberalizing gun use as one of his main policies.
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Under the slogan that the “armed population will not be enslaved,” Bolsonaro encouraged civilian access to guns and promised that, if re-elected, he will make it even easier for civilians to carry them, in a model close to that adopted in the United States.
Bolsonaro, a military reserve captain, has linked the 6.5% reduction in murders in Brazil by 2021 – its lowest level in ten years – to increased gun ownership, a thesis that has been flatly refuted by experts in the field of public security.
Data made available by the Brazilian Army and Federal Police, compiled by the Sou da Paz Institute and shared with Lusa in late June, are demonstrative of an exponential increase in gun purchases since Bolsonaro took office on January 1, 2019.
In 2018, the amount of guns held by hunters, shooters and collectors (CAC) was 350,683. In 2019 that figure jumped 24% to 433,246, in 2020 to 569,748 and by November 2021 it increased by over 100,000 to 794,958. Each CAC can hold up to 60 guns.
Permits issued for new CAC registrations have also skyrocketed: if in 2018 there were 87,989 new registrations, that number grew to more than 147,000 new entries in 2019, 218,000 in 2020 and, in the first half of 2021 alone, almost 165,000.
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“We have seen a record entry of new weapons in circulation,” the director of the Instituto Sou da Paz, Carolina Ricardo, told Lusa in June, adding that “a fairly large percentage of the weapons that are used in crime correspond to national weapons, manufactured here, sold here, legal.”
“Legal weapons play a role in the illegal market,” a problem that is even more serious when you increase “the source of legal weapons, which is what this government has done,” she said.
If you add up the number of weapons purchased by CACs, private weapons of military personnel and active weapons for self-defense you see a strong, sustained rise in the last three years.
In 2018 there were 1,320,582, but from then on the numbers rise: in 2019, the first year of Bolsonaro’s mandate, 1,509,459 (+14%), the following year there is a 20% increase and the number of weapons is 1,817,073. Finally, by November 2021, the number of weapons is already 2,344,882, according to official data compiled by the institute.
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The Instituto Sou Pela Paz has recorded, since the beginning of Bolsonaro’s mandate in 2019, at least 40 norms, among decrees, ordinances, normative instructions to facilitate access to weapons.
