SAO PAULO (AP) – Katia Sastre was taking her 7-year-old to class in Suzano, a violent city near Sao Paulo, when she saw a young man pulling a gun at other parents standing at the school’s front door.
Within seconds, she pulled the .38 special she carried in her bag.
The three off-duty policeman’s shots killed the robber that morning in May 2018 and began her transformation into a beacon for champions of looser gun control. Security camera footage produced medals, social media star power and a congressional run in the same conservative wave that lifted pro-armed lawmaker Jair Bolsonaro from the margins to the presidency.
Now a legislator herself, she supports Bolsonaro’s attempt to deliver a gun to any Brazilian who wants one, and dismisses the concerns of public security experts over the president’s four recently-enacted weapons decisions. They go into effect next month – unless Congress or the courts intervene.
“Brazilians want guarantees of self-defense because they feel insecure about crime,” Sastre told The Associated Press, which blamed a 2003 disarmament law for heightened violence and more than 65,000 violent deaths in Brazil in 2017. ” murders were used, they were in the hands of civilians, they came illegally from traffickers and criminals. “
According to the most recent poll, Sastre is in the minority of Brazilians, nearly three-quarters of whom want tougher gun laws.Still, the unpopular proposal is among Bolsonaro’s top priorities for deploying his recently replenished political capital even in Brazil’s worst battle of the pandemic, with about 1,800 people dying a day.
Anti-gun activists, a former defense secretary and senior former police officers, including a former national public security secretary, warn that the decrees will only add to the death toll.
The two decrees causing the most controversy would increase the number of weapons the average Brazilians can own – to six, from four currently – and allow them to carry two at a time. Police officers, chief supporters of the president, could have eight firearms if the decrees hold.
Ilona Szabó, director of the security-focused Igarape Institute in Rio de Janeiro, has withdrawn against Bolsonaro’s attempts to get more weapons from Brazilians. Nominated to a National Security Council, she faced a deluge of threats from Bolsonaro devotees and had to flee the country. From abroad, she is urging lawmakers and the country’s Supreme Court to scrap the measures.
Judges are expected to rule on the first of at least ten disputes to the decrees within a few weeks.
“There is no technical justification for those decrees; it is clear that they make policing more difficult and could ultimately benefit criminal organizations, ”said Szabó.
The number of gunfire deaths increased 6% per year between 1980 and 2003, when the Disarmament Act was passed. After that, the rate dropped to 0.9% in 2018, when it was fully implemented, according to the Violence Atlas of the government research institute IPEA. That shows that fewer weapons translate into fewer deaths, Szabó said.
And while homicides increased in the years up to 2017, they plunged into 2018 – even before any measures were taken to ease gun controls.
Bolsonaro’s pro-gun position was a trademark of his seven terms as legislator. In July 2018, he shocked opponents by teaching a toddler how to make the finger gun that represented his presidential campaign.
When he took office in January 2019, a person could possess two guns but had to submit to a grueling process to check criminal record, work, psychological and physical fitness, as well as write a statement explaining that he had a gun needed.
The May 2019 decrees allowed rural landowners to carry weapons through their properties, increased annual ammunition surcharges, and allowed registered shooters and hunters to transport weapons from their homes to the beaches.
Last month, Igarape and the Sou da Paz Institute, which investigates violence, said there were nearly 1.2 million legal weapons in the hands of Brazilians, 65% more than in the month before Bolsonaro’s tenure began.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain who expresses nostalgia for Brazil’s three decades of military rule, has said he wants to arm civilians to prevent a dictatorship from gaining the upper hand. He has suggested that armed civilians could counter local government restrictions on activities during the pandemic.
“An armed population will end this game of keeping everyone at home,” the president said on Christmas Eve.
The decrees also empower the local councils of psychologists to authorize shooting range members to possess weapons, in lieu of experts chosen by Brazil’s federal police. And they wrestle out of the military’s control over the sale of bullets of different caliber, making them harder to track, and they increase annual ammunition charges by a whopping fivefold.
These are welcome prospects for the likes of Eduardo Barzana, president of a shooting club in Americana, a rural town in the state of Sao Paulo. Before a practice session, while pulling out his semi-automatic assault rifles and preparing his goggles, he explained why he encourages Bolsonaro’s movements to loosen up the controls.
“Guns are like cell phones; it’s the person behind them that matters, ”said Barzana. “What the government is doing is benefiting our sport and giving the average citizen the right to defend themselves.”
Former public security secretary José Vicente da Silva acknowledges that the decrees would help the responsible owners, but says they will also facilitate guns falling into the wrong hands. A month after Sastre was sworn in as a legislator, students from the school she once attended became the target of a shooting; the attackers used weapons bought online.
“No one needs six or eight guns for protection, and there is no apparent reason to give so many guns to shooters and hunters,” said da Silva, who retired from Sao Paulo state police after three decades of service. “The decrees make it nearly impossible for the police to track down bullets or weapons. If this continues, we will have stockpiles of weapons, many of which have been purchased by organized crime. ”
Some analysts have expressed fear that the riot at the Capitol in January could provoke an armed uprising by Bolsonaro supporters if he fails to win a second term in office in next year’s election.
Bolsonaro’s son of the legislature, Eduardo, a gun rights supporter and former federal police officer, visited the White House on the eve of the riot. He later denied any connection to the invasion.
On March 8, Eduardo Bolsonaro told the O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper during a visit to Jerusalem that if rioters had been organized in the US, they would have been able to capture the Capitol and make their demands heard, and minimum of warlike power ”to avoid casualties on their side. In 2018, he said it would only take two soldiers to close the Supreme Court.
Statements like those questions Igarape’s Szabó and other analysts warn that the risks to democracy are greater in Brazil than in the US.
“This rhetoric of politicizing the issue, where the president says he will arm citizens against lockdowns or electoral fraud, is Trump’s model,” Szabo said. “We saw what happened in the invasion of the Capitol, with deaths. It could be worse. “
In the US, gun sales peaked in January after the riot, continuing the record-breaking boom that began when the pandemic struck. Gun sales often soar during election years amid concerns that a new government could change gun laws. US President Joe Biden has backed gun control measures such as a ban on “assault weapons”.
In Brazil, both the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate won their positions last month with Bolsonaro’s support. Congressional analysts say it is unlikely that either will thwart the president on an issue so dear to his base. The opposition is not strong enough to get the votes needed to overturn the decrees.
Caravans of Bolsonaro supporters drove through the streets of major cities on Sunday. Photos that went viral on social media showed some guns sticking to their car windows.
“We operate here outside of public safety; this is the field of politics, that’s really serious, ”said Raul Jungmann, a former defense and public security minister. “Arming the population is always at the service of coups d’état, massacres, genocides and dictatorships.”