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SAO PAULO, May 5 (AP) Just under a deadline, Jonathan Schmidt arrived at federal police headquarters in downtown Rio de Janeiro with a travel bag containing a golden pistol and seven rifles , one of which protrudes from the zipper.
“I fell in love with guns,” Schmidt said. “If the government allowed it, I would have more than 2,000.”
He already legally registers the firearms of sport shooters like himself, but experts have expressed doubts about the reliability of its database and say lax regulation has led to such guns falling into the hands of criminals. On Wednesday, Schmidt had the last day to add his guns to police registers to comply with a decree by Brazil’s new leftist president – or face confiscation.
In more than four years in office, former President Jair Bolsonaro sought to turn a country with few arms into one where guns and a lack of regulation meant individual freedom.
Now, his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has been working to dismantle Bolsonaro’s pro-gun policies, starting with requiring gun owners to register them with the police. weapons. After initial resistance, he began to see success.
But Justice Minister Flávio Dino told reporters Thursday that more than 6,000 restricted-use firearms, including assault rifles, previously registered with the military were not turned over to police before the May 3 deadline . These have likely been diverted to criminals and are now the target of investigation and potential forfeiture, he said.
During Brazil’s last gun control campaign in 2003, Brazilians were invited to turn in their guns and received a nominal payment from the state. It has a high level of participation.
In the eyes of right-wing Bolsonaro, however, the disarmament code is a historic mistake. Echoing American conservatism, he was the first Brazilian presidential candidate to campaign on a pro-gun platform, saying “good citizens” have a right to guns to protect their families and assets. He changed the rules about how much ammunition a person can have and access to restricted firearms. He repeatedly claimed that “an armed populace will never be enslaved”.
The Instituto Sou da Paz, a nonprofit that monitors public safety, estimates that under Bolsonaro, the number of guns in civilian hands has nearly tripled — to 2.2 million in a country of 214 million people branch. It’s still far below the US, and Brazil has no constitutional right to bear arms.
“We’ve had a dramatic increase in access to guns, including restricted-use weapons,” Michelle Dos Ramos, who leads the Justice Department’s gun policy task force, told The Associated Press by phone. “In order to develop any guidelines to restructure firearms and ammunition policy and regulations, it’s important that we have a diagnosis of what’s going on with these weapons.”
On Lula’s first day in office, he issued a decree requiring gun owners to register their weapons with the federal police, delaying the original deadline by a month. At the federal police headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, officers register firearms belonging to as many as 50 people a day.
But people have been wary.
“In the beginning, when they got here, people were very worried. They thought we were going to confiscate their guns,” Marcelo Daemon, head of Rio police arms control, said in an interview at his office. “There’s a lot of misinformation circulating on social media and people are coming here with fear.”
Some politicians have contributed to a general reluctance to register firearms. On March 17, federal MP Julia Zanatta shared a photo of herself holding a machine gun and wearing a “COME AND TAKE IT” T-shirt, as well as a picture of Lula’s hand being slapped three times. photo of a bullet hole. Paulo Bilynskyj, a lawmaker from São Paulo and former police chief, shared instructions to follow when weapons are confiscated.
“We have a more armed nation, a stronger gun culture, more representation focused on a pro-gun agenda,” said Carolina Ricardo, executive director of the Instituto Sou da Paz, adding that Congress would be a “thorn in the side” of the group Push for stricter gun controls. The so-called “Bullet Caucus” of pro-gun lawmakers picked up dozens of new seats in last year’s election.
Before Lula’s government initiated the registry, the military collected and kept data on gun ownership for sporting shooters, collectors and hunters, known as the CAC. Bolsonaro removed the requirement that such registrants have to go through the arduous process of submitting documents, certifications and psychological tests to the federal police, which registers firearms for self-defense, thus limiting the force’s knowledge of the total number of firearms. cycle.
Until recent Army figures showed that the CAC had purchased 7,62,365 firearms since May 7, 2019, when Bolsonaro made significant changes to the acquisition of firearms and ammunition. But Instituto Sou da Paz and another safety-focused nonprofit, the Igarape Institute, estimated based on data collected through freedom of information requests that the figure misses roughly 100,000 additional firearms. Late last month, the military quietly updated its database to reflect nearly 200,000 more registered firearms, according to the Justice Department.
By requiring in-person registration, the government hopes to determine exactly how many and which types of guns no longer belong to their original owners and are at risk of falling into the hands of criminal groups.
Figures released by Minister Dino on Thursday showed 9,39,154 firearms were registered with the federal police, including most of the most recent additions to the army’s database.
“This (number) is probably larger than the arsenal of almost all the military police in the country,” he said. “In Brazil we already have a lot of guns falling into private hands.”
Gun advocates mostly showed up, though some only reluctantly encouraged their followers to do so. Federal lawmaker Marcos Pollon, who leads a pro-gun group often compared to the National Rifle Association, called the administration’s efforts “absolutely illegal and unconstitutional” in mid-March. A week later, he posted a video on YouTube, which has more than 150,000 subscribers, saying he registered his guns and that those who didn’t would face consequences.
The attorney general plans to present Lula with a new decree by May 15, imposing new rules on shooting clubs and gun stores and limiting the number of guns and ammunition civilians can acquire.
Schmidt, a gun owner in Rio de Janeiro, finds the government’s registration efforts embarrassing. But now, he said, he realizes it’s important for federal police to know about all the weapons civilians have.
“That way, we’re still legal,” he said. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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