Brazil Cracks Down on Gun Owners

SÃO PAULO — Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva passed a decree Friday to tighten gun control in his latest effort to remove firearms from the streets of Latin America’s biggest country after a surge in purchases under his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

Promising to “bring the country back to normality,” da Silva signed the decree in a ceremony at the presidential palace, reducing the number of guns Brazilians can buy for self-defense to two from four, cutting yearly ammunition allowances to 50 from 200 bullets and banning 24-hour shooting clubs.

The decree follows a series of other measures to rein in gun ownership since da Silva took office in January, including a ban on carrying loaded weapons, passed only a few hours into his presidency.

Gun control has become a deeply divisive issue in Brazil, a country awash with gun crime that registered more homicides than anywhere in the world as recently as 2017, mostly carried out with firearms.

While da Silva’s left-wing Workers’ Party and many crime experts argue that cutting the number of firearms in circulation will reduce gun crime, Bolsonaro and groups on the political right have argued that Brazilians deserve the right to defend themselves against the country’s heavily armed criminals.

“We will keep fighting to disarm Brazil—it’s the police and the armed forces who should be armed,” said da Silva in a speech Friday, in which he also announced measures to beef up policing along drug-trafficking routes in the Amazon.

“We cannot allow people to amass an arsenal of weapons,” he said. “We cannot be sure that these guns are only being sold to decent and honest people, people who just want a gun for protection,” said da Silva, adding that he feared that looser gun laws made it easier for criminals to arm themselves.

Under the new decree, Brazilians who buy guns for hunting will be able to own six guns rather than 30 previously. Gun sales by hunters had soared under Bolsonaro, sparking criticisms among antigun campaigners who argued that it made little sense to grant so many guns to hunters in a country where it is illegal to hunt animals other than wild boar.

Brazilians who shoot as a sport used to be able to buy up to 150,000 bullets a year and in some cases now will only have access to as few as 4,000 bullets, the government said. The decree also bans access to some guns such as 9mm handguns and forces shooting clubs to close at 10 p.m. rather than operate around the clock.

Under Bolsonaro, gun owners were allowed to carry loaded firearms as long as they were on their way to a shooting club. Brazil’s Justice Minister Flávio Dino said he suspected some clubs stayed open just to give their members a legitimate excuse to carry loaded weapons any time of day or night.

“You would arrest someone at two in the morning with a loaded weapon and he would say that he was on his way to a shooting club,” Dino said in a television interview Friday after the ceremony.

But many of Brazil’s gun owners say the government’s crackdown is unfair.

“It’s terrible for the sport,” said Gustavo Mariano, the owner of a store selling gun accessories in the central state of Goiás. “During one day at the range, a person can shoot off a thousand bullets, these rules make it unviable.”

If Brazilians can’t train how to shoot properly, then they will end up at the mercy of criminals, said Gustavo Pazzini, a gun-club owner. “Without shooting clubs, there is no sport…while the criminals continue to be well-armed.”

Write to Samantha Pearson at [email protected] and Luciana Magalhaes at [email protected]