SÃO PAULO (AP) – Katia Sastre was taking her 7-year-old son to class in Suzano, a violent city near São Paulo, when she saw a young man draw a pistol from other parents who were at the school door.
Within seconds, she pulled out the .38 special she carried in her bag.
The off-duty policeman’s three shots killed the assailant that morning in May 2018 and began his transformation into a beacon for champions of more flexible gun control. Images from security cameras produced medals, the star power of social media and a run for Congress in the same conservative wave that lifted pro-gun lawmaker Jair Bolsonaro from the periphery to the presidency.
Now a lawmaker herself, she is supporting Bolsonaro’s pressure to deliver a weapon to every Brazilian he wants, and dismisses the concerns of public security experts over the four arms decrees recently issued by the president. They will take 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, blaming a 2003 disarmament law for the increase in violence and more than 65,000 violent deaths in Brazil in 2017. “The weapons used in these murders were not in the hands of the citizens; they came illegally from drug dealers and criminals. “
Sastre is a minority of Brazilians, almost three-quarters of whom want stricter firearm laws, according to the latest research. However, the unpopular proposal is among Bolsonaro’s top priorities for deploying his newly replenished political capital, even in the worst throes of the pandemic in Brazil, with about 1,800 people dying a day.
Anti-gun activists, a former defense minister and former high-ranking police officers, including a former national public security secretary, warn that the decrees will only increase the body count.
The two decrees that cause the most controversy would increase the number of weapons that an average Brazilian can own – from four currently to six – and allow them to carry two simultaneously. Police officers, the president’s main supporters, can have eight firearms if the decrees pass.
Ilona Szabó, director of the Igarapé Institute, focused on security in Rio de Janeiro, has resisted Bolsonaro’s attempts to provide Brazilians with more weapons. Appointed to a national security council, she faced a deluge of threats from Bolsonaro’s devotees and had to flee the country. From abroad, she is asking the country’s legislators and Supreme Court to eliminate the measures.
The court’s judges are expected to decide within weeks on the first of at least 10 challenges to the decrees.
“There is no technical justification for these decrees; it is evident that they make policing difficult and may end up favoring criminal organizations, ”said Szabó.
The number of gunfire deaths increased by 6% from 1980 to 2003, when the disarmament law was passed. After that, the rate dropped to 0.9% by 2018, when it was fully implemented, according to the Atlas of Violence from the government research institute IPEA. This shows that fewer weapons translates to fewer deaths, said Szabó.
And while homicides increased in the years before 2017, they plummeted in 2018 – before any measures to loosen gun control.
Bolsonaro’s pro-weapons stance was a hallmark of his seven terms as legislator. In July 2018, he shocked opponents by teaching a child to make the finger gun sign that represented his presidential campaign.
When he took office in January 2019, a person could have two guns, but had to undergo a costly criminal background check, job, physical and psychological fitness, and write a statement explaining the need for a gun .
May 2019 decrees allowed landowners to carry weapons on their property, increased the annual ammunition subsidy, and allowed registered snipers and hunters to transport weapons from their homes to the stoves.
Last month, Igarapé and the Sou da Paz Institute, which researches violence, said there were almost 1.2 million legal weapons in the hands of Brazilians, an increase of 65% over the month before Bolsonaro’s term of office.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain who expresses nostalgia for Brazil’s three decades of military rule, said he wants to arm citizens to prevent a dictatorship from installing itself. He suggested that armed citizens could contain local government restrictions on activities during the pandemic.
“An armed population will end this game that everyone needs to stay at home,” said the president on Christmas Eve.
The decrees also empower local councils of psychologists to grant members of the shooting range permission to own weapons, rather than experts chosen by the Federal Police of Brazil. And they take control over sales of various caliber shells from the Army, which makes them more difficult to track, and increase annual ammunition concessions by up to five times.
These are welcome perspectives for people like Eduardo Barzana, president of a shooting club in Americana, a city in the interior of São Paulo. Before a training session, while taking off the semiautomatic assault rifles and preparing his goggles, he explained why he applauded Bolsonaro’s moves to loosen the controls.
“Weapons 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 ordinary citizens the right to defend themselves.”
Former Secretary of Public Security José Vicente da Silva recognizes that the decrees would help responsible owners, but says they will also make it easier for weapons to fall into the wrong hands. A month after Sastre took office as legislator, students at the school she attended were the target of a shootout; the assailants used weapons purchased online.
“Nobody needs six or eight weapons to protect themselves and there is no obvious reason to give so many guns to snipers and hunters,” said Silva, who retired from the São Paulo State Police after three decades of service. “The decrees make it almost impossible for the police to track bullets or weapons. If that happens, we will have stockpiles of weapons, many of which are bought by organized crime. ”
Some analysts have expressed fears that the riot at the U.S. Capitol in January could inspire an armed revolt by Bolsonaro supporters if he fails to win a second term in next year’s election.
The son of Bolsonaro’s lawmaker, Eduardo, an obstinate companion for the rights of arms and a former federal police officer, visited the White House on the eve of the riot. He later denied any link to the invasion.
On March 8, Eduardo Bolsonaro told the newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo during a visit to Jerusalem that if the troublemakers in the United States had organized themselves, they would have been able to take over the Capitol and make their demands heard, and had “no minimum bellicose power ”to avoid casualties on their side. In 2018, he said that only two soldiers would be needed to close the Supreme Court.
Statements like these warn Szabó de Igarapé and other analysts warn that the risks to democracy in Brazil are greater than in the United States.
“This rhetoric of politicization of the issue, with the president saying he will arm citizens against blockades or electoral fraud, is Trump’s model,” said Szabo. “We saw what happened in the invasion of the Capitol, with deaths. It could have been worse. “
In the United States, arms sales reached a historic peak in January, after the turmoil, and continued with the record increase that started with the start of the pandemic. Arms sales generally rise during election years amid fears that a new government may change gun laws. US President Joe Biden supported arms control measures, such as a ban on “assault weapons”.
In Brazil, both the mayor and the president of the Senate won their positions last month with Bolsonaro’s support. Congressional analysts say it is unlikely that any of them will upset the president on a subject that his base so much considers. The opposition is not strong enough to get the votes needed to overturn the decrees.
Caravans of Bolsonaro supporters roamed the streets of major cities on Sunday. Images that went viral on social media showed some holding guns near their car windows.
“We are operating beyond public security here; this is the terrain of politics, which is very serious, ”said Raul Jungmann, former Minister of Defense and Public Security. “The arming of populations is always done in the service of coups, massacres, genocides and dictatorships”.