Column: Brazil pulls the trigger on another defeat for gun control
Date: Oct 26, 2005 8:03 AM
PUBLICATION: Telegraph-Journal (NB)
DATE: 2005.10.26
SECTION: Opinion/Editorial
PAGE: A11
COLUMN: Gwynne Dyer
BYLINE: GWYNNE DYER WORLD AFFAIRS
WORD COUNT: 884

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Brazil pulls the trigger on another defeat for gun control

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Last Sunday in Brazil, a country with the second-highest rate of gun
deaths on the planet, almost two-thirds of Brazilians voted against a
total ban on the sale of firearms. Explain that.

Brazil loses 38,000 people a year in gun-related killings. That is twice
as bad as the United States, generally regarded as the industry leader
in these matters: the U.S. has one and a half times Brazil’s population,
but only 30,000 Americans are shot to death each year. In Brazil, just
being on the street can be fatal, with thousands of innocent people
killed in the crossfire each year as rival gangs fight for control of
the drug trade. And yet Brazilians voted to keep the sale of guns legal.

Part of the answer was a ruthless media campaign by the local gun lobby
that exploited the free television time both sides are granted in
Brazilian referendums. They hijacked Nelson Mandela’s image and claimed
he opposed gun control (until his lawyers made them stop). They compared
pro-ban advocates to Nazis. They translated reams of propaganda from the
National Rifle Association in the United States and pumped it out over
the air unaltered, with the result that millions of Brazilians now
believe they have a constitutional right to bear arms. (They don’t.)

It was crude, but it worked. One month before the referendum, opinion
polls suggested that 80 per cent of Brazilians would vote in favour of
the gun ban. Last Sunday, 63 per cent voted against it. Yet the answer
cannot simply be that the pro-gun side had better propaganda: Brazilians
are not politically unsophisticated people. The issue is more
complicated than it seems.

Brazil already has very strict gun-control laws. Faced with a 37 per
cent increase in the homicide rate between 1992 and 1999, the Brazilian
Congress passed laws in the past few years that require all guns to be
registered, raise the minimum age for gun ownership to 25, and make it
illegal to carry a firearm outside one’s home or business. It also
funded a national buy-back programme that took 400,000 weapons out of
circulation, and caused (or at least coincided with) an eight per cent
drop in the gun death rate last year.

All those steps enjoyed popular support, but the referendum proposal -
to ban all sales of guns and ammunition in Brazil except to the police
and military – was clearly a step too far. People don’t trust the
Brazilian police to protect them, and they know that the criminals will
always be able to get their hands on guns anyway.

This is a rather circular argument, since the main way Brazilian
criminals get their guns is by stealing them: 72 per cent of the guns
used in crimes in Rio in the past six years were originally registered
to ordinary, law-abiding citizens or to the police and armed forces. But
perception is everything in politics, and many people feel that owning a
gun makes them safer. Besides, there is some truth behind the NRA’s
slogan that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

There are only an estimated 17 million guns in private hands in Brazil,
a country of 182 million people. By contrast, there are 192 million
firearms in private hands in America, which has 296 million people.

Partly, this just shows that Americans are richer than Brazilians, with
American gun-owners typically owning two, three or many firearms.

Three-quarters of adult Americans actually own no gun at all. But that
still means that around one in four Americans owns at least one gun,
while maybe one in ten Brazilians does.

So why do Brazilians kill one another at twice the rate of Americans?
For the same reason that Americans shoot one another at four or five
time the rate of people in Israel or Switzerland, even though a majority
of adult men in those countries, because they are army reservists, keep
automatic weapons in their homes. The reason is culture: it is people,
not guns, who kill people.

Almost all the countries with really high rates of gun killings are the
former settler societies of the Americas, where in a relatively recent
past most people were armed and there was no effective law enforcement.
So Americans are much more likely to shoot one another than French or
Japanese, and Brazilians, with even more lawless attitudes, are more
likely to shoot one another than Americans – and Venezuelans are
completely off the graph, with three times the American rate of gun
killings.

Far more than the rest of the world, these are the societies that really
need gun control, but given their traditions, they are the least likely
to accept it. Last year, for example, the U.S. Congress allowed a law
banning assault weapons to lapse, and just this month it passed a law
indemnifying gun-makers against lawsuits for crimes committed with their
products.

Failing gun control, the only other way for these societies to lower the
gun-death rate substantially would be to legalize drugs, which would at
least put the gangs out of business.

But since they are also quite puritanical about drug abuse, they can’t
do that either. They will just have to live with their guns and the
killings that come with them.