A visitor holds a weapon during the Brazilian Shooting Fair, an arms exhibition held at the Expoville Convention and Exhibition Center in Joinville, Santa Catarina state, Brazil, on August 5.
Albari Sosa / AFP via Getty Images
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A visitor holds a weapon during the Brazilian Shooting Fair, an arms exhibition held at the Expoville Convention and Exhibition Center in Joinville, Santa Catarina state, Brazil, on August 5.
Albari Sosa / AFP via Getty Images
RIO BONITO, Brazil – At a shooting range, a man applying for a gun license pointed a pistol and fired 10 times at a humanoid target 20 feet away. Nearly all bullets hit the target’s sweet spot in the center of the body.
The shooter, Wagner Carneiro, is a former Brazilian Army sergeant. He explained that a man in a car asking for directions suddenly pointed a gun to his head and demanded his cell phone. Now, 40-year-old Carneiro wants a gun of his own.
Wagner Carneiro at the shooting range in Rio Bonito, Brazil, on July 16.
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Wagner Carneiro at the shooting range in Rio Bonito, Brazil, on July 16.
John Otis / NPR
“I needed it to protect my family,” he said, speaking from within the town of Rio Bonito, about 40 miles west of Rio de Janeiro.
Thanks to President Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist whose hero is former President Donald Trump, it has become a lot easier for Brazilians like Carneiro to get guns. Since coming to power in 2019, Bolsonaro has issued more than a dozen decrees relaxing restrictions on gun ownership for civilians.
Bolsonaro, who is facing a tough re-election battle in October, enthusiastically flirted with Brazil’s burgeoning gun corridor and often posed for gun signs with his thumb and index finger.
Fábio Zanini, a columnist of Folha de S.Paulo, a leading Brazilian newspaper. “Gun owners are one of his main electoral bases.”
There are still more gun regulations in Brazil than in the US, including mandatory gun safety and psychology exams. But now private citizens can buy more powerful pistols and ammunition in larger quantities. Collectors and competitive shooters can purchase automatic rifles.
Since 2018, the number of guns in private hands has doubled to nearly 2 million, according to data from the Brazilian military and police analyzed by the Brazilian security organization. Sou da Paz.
Gun shops and shooting tournaments are springing up all over Brazil. These include Schützenfest, is held in southern Brazil, which has a large German population, and is a combination of beer-drenched Oktoberfest and shooting. Average of one new shooting range Brazil’s UOL website reports every day it has been open for Bolsonaro’s nearly four years in power.
Some gun enthusiasts in Brazil imitate their American counterparts by talking about their “Second Amendment” rights, even though there is no constitutional right to bear arms here. Others, like Rodrigo Santoro, who is training to be a weapons instructor at the Rio Bonito shooting range, don’t trust the police to protect them from well-equipped criminals.
“The main rule is to protect yourself, your family, your home,” he said. “We keep guns in good hands because the bad guys have guns.”
After President Bolsonaro, Brazil’s highest gun advocate, is his son, congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro. In July, he celebrated his 38th birthday with a cake decorated with a revolver. He claims that relaxed gun regulations have helped reduce the murder rate in Brazil.
“It’s the biggest drop in homicides … since 1980,” he said Tucker Carlson by Fox News in June. “So Brazil is safer, thank God, for this policy.”
But the country murder rate Bruno Langeani, manager of Sou da Paz, was on his way down even before Bolsonaro took office. And despite this trend, the homicide rate here with more than 22 homicides per 100,000 people is still more than three times higher than WE by 2020, according to World Bank data.
Cecília Olliveira, director Fogo CruzadoA project that maps gun violence in Brazilian cities, says that instead of promoting gun ownership for self-protection, authorities should focus on reforming the police.
“When you [say]: “I have to defend myself because the police don’t work, ‘this is not true,'” she said. The point is: We have to make the police work properly. “
Mass shootings by civilians in Brazil are rare. However, increasing gun ownership has led to more child-related suicides and gun accidents, says Langeani of the research organization Sou da Paz. Also, he said drug trafficking groups are recruiting civilians to legally purchase automatic rifles, which are then passed on to criminals.
“We’re seeing more and more episodes of what in the US you call a ‘straw buyer’ – a shift away from guns to crime,” he said.
A Brazilian citizen shows his identity card to a Federal Police officer (left) as he trades two rifles as part of the national gun buyback program, in São Paulo, Brazil, on 23 July 2004.
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A Brazilian citizen shows his identity card to a Federal Police officer (left) as he trades two rifles as part of a national firearms buyback program, in São Paulo, Brazil, on July 23, 2004.
Mauricio Lima / AFP via Getty Images
Before the election in October, poll shows that President Bolsonaro is pursuing leftist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He is the former president who tightened Brazil’s gun laws when he first took office in 2003. That law prevented ordinary citizens from buying guns while the buyback program resulted in more returns 700,000 handguns. Soon after, Brazil’s homicide rate dropped, although it started to rise again in 2007.
So the prospect that Lula, as the widely known former president, could return to power has some Brazilians scrambling to get a gun license, said Alexandre Coelho, a teacher at the school. shot in Rio Bonito and was a staunch supporter of Bolsonaro said.
“Left governments do not believe in the right to self-defense. They believe that the state must protect you and will always [there] to protect you. It was a lie,” he said. Right-wing governments believe in the right to self-defense. “
Among his clients is Carneiro, the man who was robbed with a gun for his cell phone and is currently completing his shooting test. When examining the bullet holes on the target, Coelho was impressed.
“95 points total” out of 100 possible, he said. “He’s approved.”
